Tel-Aviv, March 17 — Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister since 2009 (and before that between 1996 and 1999) was re-elected once more to the office of prime minister. This open fascist servant of the U.S. billionaire Sheldon Adleson won the election by warning his voters that “Arabs are going to the polls en-masse.” This racist ploy drove many racist Israelis to vote for him rather than the competing right-wingers, bringing him a victory against the Zionist Camp —the so-called “left-wing” party based on the old Labor party and elements of the now-defunct Kadima list.
Racism runs rampant on both sides of the Zionist political map: both the Netanyahu camp with their open anti-Palestinian propaganda, as well as the so-called “Left” of the Zionist movement. The Israel foreign minister Lieberman said that Arab Israel critics should be beheaded. Various people in the orbit of the Labor Party, such as the “publicist” Yair Garbuz, expressed their dissatisfaction with their party’s failure to win the election in blatantly racist terms about the “primitive Mizrachi [Middle Eastern] Jews who kiss Mezuzoth and worship talismans. Another racist, Prof. Amir Hezroni, even told a Mizrachi woman who came to an interview alongside him that “it would have been better if her parents were left to rot in Morrocco.” This election allowed all Zionists to show their true faces: they are racist pawns of U.S. imperialism, who hate the working class.
Many people on the Israeli left were very dissatisfied with the results of these elections. But we as communists point out to our friends that we should not despair when one bosses’ stooge is beaten by another bosses’ stooge. Even if Herzog (Zionist Camp) would have won the elections, we would still face the same tax hikes, budget cuts and growing wars, not to mention a continued siege of Gaza.
Election = Bosses’ Stooges Fight It Out
Netanyahu is the servant of the U.S. billionaire Sheldon Adelson, it is true. But Herzog is similarly the slave of local bosses such as the press tycoon Arnon Moses, owner of the Yediot Ahronot newspaper, as well as a servile lackey of the Rockefeller wing of U.S. capitalists.
The elections were a fight between racist bosses. We workers have no side in this fight, and should instead focus on the real fight for working-class emancipation and an end to Zionist apartheid in Israel-Palestine. We also point out that approximately four million Palestinians who live in areas under de-facto Israeli military rule are not allowed to participate in these phony elections; the rulers decide who is allowed to vote and who counts the votes and then boast about how their country is a “democracy” where one-third of the population they lord over is not allowed to vote in the capitalist elections.
We tell workers that the road for liberation is communist revolution. We must build a mass working-class movement encompassing workers of all ethnic backgrounds — Ashkenazi Jews, Mizrachi Jews, Palestinian-Arabs, immigrants, and refugees.
The ruling class has only racism to offer. They intensify their attack on our class, imprisoning hundreds of refugees in a so-called “open residential facility” in Holot (i.e., a prison camp) without trial; they murder hundreds of Palestinians in Gaza. They prepare Jewish workers for more and more imperialist wars to kill and be killed for the bosses’ glory and profits.
Our answer is to build a unified workers’ movement for the liberation of our class. It is time we organize to kick out this rotten system of war and oppression and replace it with a communist system which will serve our class.