[INTERNATIONALISM] Sworn enemies, false friends and true allies of the Palestinian cause, today and in perspective

Sworn enemies, false friends and true allies of the Palestinian cause,

today and in perspective

– Internationalist Revolutionary Tendency

It is up to us militant internationalists, irreducible enemies of all bourgeois power, to tell a bitter truth: if the genocide of Palestinians underway in Gaza can go on for months until it makes that territory totally uninhabitable for its inhabitants, as the butcher Netanyahu planned, this can happen only and exclusively because of American weapons and dollars; Azeri, Arab, Brazilian, Russian oil; the complicity of the states and the filthy Italian and European mass media; and finally because of the cynicism of the other false friends of the Palestinian cause (Turkey, China, Iran) who stand at the window impassively watching the horrendous “show”, studying how they can profit from the blood shed by the Palestinians.

With all the differentiations and contradictions of the case, a de facto alliance of the greatest capital powers has been forged against the Palestinians, the most proletarianized and irreducible people in the world.

Helping Israel carry out its genocidal action is not only the “collective West”, a sworn enemy of the freedom of the Palestinian masses, with the United States of the killer-in-chief Biden in the lead. There is the Brics gang, old and new. There is Russia, a historical great friend of Israel and above all of its ultra-Zionist right, willing to verbally distance itself from the massacre only to blame it on Washington, and with this ploy protect the gangsters in power in Israel. There is Brazil, a major oil supplier to Tel Aviv. There is India which, while the massacre is underway, has concluded an agreement to supply manpower to Israel to replace tens of thousands of Palestinian proletarians who are to be fired and plunged into unemployment and poverty. There are all the Arab countries that – beyond the occasional phrases – have not lifted a single finger to block, or even reduce, the oil supplies essential for extermination.

The friendliest of the states that profess to be “friends” of the Palestinians, Iran, wanted to officially assure the assembly of the assassins in this way: “Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Supreme Leader of Iran, told Haniyeh [one of the top exponents of Hamas – n.] that Iran, a long-time supporter of Hamas, will continue to give political support, but will not intervene directly in the conflict”. After a similar solemn declaration issued to the whole world by the Reuters agency on November 15th, Tehran’s subsequent warnings that Israel is crossing this or that “red line” are nothing more than gargles. Moreover, Iran had advised Hamas against taking any offensive initiative against the occupying colonial power, waiting for its internal attrition – which may be understandable for an independent state, but proved unbearable for a stateless population like that of Gaza, suffocated in the most basic vital needs by fifteen very long years of total siege and intermittent massacres, not calling into question the previous sixty years of oppression. Regarding China, it will be enough to observe this: in a country of 1.4 billion inhabitants there is not one, not a single!, demonstration of solidarity with the Palestinians. In Russia, the only completely spontaneous demonstration of solidarity, which occurred in an airport in Dagestan, was attacked and dispersed by the police. This, speaking of friends of the Palestinian cause…

If so – can anyone prove otherwise? – then we must take note that in its heroic defense from the Zionist extermination machine, the Palestinian people have as their only, authentic allies the tens of millions of demonstrators who in these two months have filled the squares all over the world, starting with the Arab world, to shout their anger against the Zionist butchers and their protectors and accomplices, and to testify, in some cases swear, that we all feel like Palestinians, and we will be until the end of this war of liberation, both inseparably national and social.

Why, and for whom, is this truth bitter?

Because it notes that the Zionist state does not find major obstacles in the action of other states so its war machine can move forward in spreading death and destruction. At the same time, it reveals how misplaced are the persistent mass illusions about the possible “progressive”, or even “anti-imperialist” role of the great and less great anti-Western capitalist powers. No, nothing like that! China, Russia, Iran have not the slightest interest in the victory of the Palestinian cause over the Zionist state because it would cause an earthquake in the entire current Middle Eastern political and social order, which they are interested in modifying to their own advantage, but certainly not in shaking it. For some time now, Palestine has ceased to be only the homeland of the Palestinians to become the homeland of the oppressed of the whole world. And as we have seen in recent months, the resistance, the resistance of the Palestinians in the face of an attack of unprecedented violence, would be hailed by all the exploited and oppressed of the world with a minimum of class consciousness as their victory, a step towards their own liberation.

In turn, Israel too has long since ceased to appear to be the safe refuge of persecuted Jews to become the universal emblem of the police state, capable of the most ruthless and technological repression and control of the exploiting class dominant over the dominated. Its main export item is, not surprisingly, “security”, and a proven method of government capable of merging democracy and Nazi-fascism into a single whole. In a historical phase of inexorable social polarization, which of the bourgeois states can renounce the improvement of the methods with which to monitor, subjugate and, when appropriate, punish “their” proletarians? This is why the democratically elected butcher Netanyahu is today the hero of bourgeois rulers around the world. Ultimately, in the context of the approaching world conflict, the last word of all bourgeois states will be open terrorism. It is not a recipe for the present moment, but in the meantime they observe, study and play the part: “we agree, destroy Hamas, but protect civilians’, pretending not to know that the Zionist objective is exactly to terrorize and attack the Palestinian population. For all the rulers of the world, therefore, Israel’s genocidal action in Gaza, and the way in which it has tried to legitimize it, is an “interesting” experiment for the times to come.

Naturally, for the United States, the Italy of Meloni and Mattarella, the European Union, this genocide is also something more. Even more vital for the immediate present, not just for the future: it must reaffirm, whatever the cost, their supreme, divine, right to dominate and plunder the entire world, not just Palestine, in the name of the supremacy of the West and the white race “civilization” in the face of the emergence of new, very dangerous competitors. Woe to anyone who tries to question this right! Having now lost the first round on the Ukrainian front, Yankee and European imperialism – taking advantage of the relative “isolation” of the Palestinians – wants to win the second by a landslide. The mountain of corpses of children, women, elderly people in Gaza and militants of the Palestinian cause must be the pedestal from which to issue a warning to the oppressed around the world. If you question our power, this is the fate that awaits you! The genocide in Gaza is, after all, the last word of Western imperialism in an irreversible crisis of hegemony.

On the other hand, the excitement that the destruction of Gaza and the orgy of spilled Palestinian blood is producing in a large part of Israeli society also demonstrates the degree of putrefaction to which Zionism and its legitimate son, ultra-Zionism, they led this society, and in it, no need to go around it, also the workers in their vast majority. Many anti-Zionist Jews around the world, who have never seen Israel as their homeland, suffer from seeing the self-proclaimed “state of the Jews” resort to the methods and symbols of Nazism. But this is. It has finally emerged in the light of day – albeit the deadly “sun” produced by terrorist bombings – that the creation of a colonial, racist, ultra-militarized state since its birth was a pretended, very false, solution to the historical tragedy of persecution and discrimination suffered in Europe by large sectors of the Jewish population (others were undoubtedly privileged).

As has been seen for over a century, Palestine was not “a land without a people” to be allocated “to a people without a land”. It was and is a land loved, dearly loved, by the native people who inhabited it and by their descendants, who largely became, from poor farmers and Bedouins that they were, proletarians without reservations, dispersed throughout the Middle East and beyond. A land so loved by the oppressed Palestinian masses that no slaughter, no Zionist terrorism, no demonization of them, no exodus, no missed opportunities, no partial defeat, no betrayal, no stabbing by friendly hands, no sell-out (think of Oslo), no corruption of its real or presumed representatives, no deceptive flattery, they managed to bend and normalize. Indeed: over time the Palestinian cause has increasingly become the cause of all those who hate the oppression of nationalities, old and new colonialism, apartheid, blind religious fanaticism, racism, the pervasive militarism with its hypertrophic material costs and its extent of brutality and violence even in personal relationships (in Israel there is a frightening spread of prostitution, including underage prostitution) – the essential features of today’s state of Israel.

From a simple national cause, as it was at its birth, the cause of the liberation of the oppressed Palestinian masses has become increasingly colored by social meanings, by given social classes. Because if it is true that in recent decades a layer of wealthy, privileged Palestinian businessmen and bureaucrats has been created, colluding with Israel, the great proletarian and semi-proletarian mass of Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank, the diaspora of the refugee camps, the Palestinians, second-class citizens of Israel, live in conditions of atrocious poverty or at least deprivation, and have to face abuse and torment of all kinds. It is from this mass, certainly not from “friendly” foreign powers, that it has continually been reborn – four mass uprisings since December 1987! – the vital necessity of Palestinian struggle and resistance in increasingly radical forms, because Zionist oppression is increasingly extreme, inhuman and intolerable. The attack on October 7th comes from this condition, it was not decided in Tehran, Tehran does not dictate to Hamas, which in turn does not have the relationship with the Palestinians that the puppeteer has with his puppets!

Following Zionist prescriptions to the letter, the infamous Italian and European mass media ban the word Palestine, replacing it with Middle East. By erasing the word, they delude themselves into thinking they can erase the reality of Palestine. Except that this word, now banned in the “free” European mass media, has never been so shouted, dear, sacred to the four corners of the planet. Starting with those oppressed, disinherited masses, who together with a part of the educated youth without work and without a future filled the squares of many Arab countries in the two great waves of uprisings of 2011-2012 and 2018-2020, bursting onto the political scene of the world. Only poor numskulls could mistake them for “color revolutions”. Instead they dared to shout from the rooftops “the people want to overthrow the regime”, the bourgeois Arab regimes enfeoffed to the West, which repaid them with abundant rations of lead and prison (like the pro-Russian Assad, a record holder in organizing the massacre of his people). The popular uprisings of the last decade have also instilled courage in the masses of Palestine who rightly dream of one day reducing to dust the Zionist state that has martyred them for 75 years. In turn, the Palestinian masses and their rebel militants, whether motivated by religious reasons or not, have repaid them, are repaying them with yet another proof of collective pride and dignity.

Despite their temporary setback, these events have highlighted that there is not only one Arab world, there are two increasingly distant and alien ones: the camp of the exploiting classes, linked in various ways to the capitalist world order – branded Washington or Beijing what does it change? – and the field of exploited classes. And since the deep division of all societies, even the richest ones, such as the United States and Europe, is a universal fact, the conditions have been created for the message of struggle of the oppressed and exploited masses of Palestine and you reach very far from the Arab world.

And this is why the Palestinian resistance has acquired over the years, and especially today, an exceptional symbolic strength. Palestine is everywhere. Everywhere freedom is absent due to the presence of mechanisms of exploitation and domination that are taking the breath away from the working class of all races, nationalities, religions or non-religions, and from nature itself. Everywhere we fight without fear to free ourselves from these universal mechanisms typical of capitalism of every “color” and every latitude – even among young ecologists like Greta, labeled by certain mindless people as paid soldiers of the very false “green conversion” of global capital.

We know it: our thesis that the only true allies of the Palestinian cause are the exploited and oppressed of the whole world, that the only prospect of the liberation of Palestine is that of a gigantic uprising of the exploited of the whole area which overthrows both the Zionist state and its accomplices Arab regimes to constitute a single federation of countries free from imperialist domination and capitalism may seem like an unrealistic dream for idealists. But one round of clashes after another, concrete experience is demonstrating that the hope of being able to receive help from the Arab states or the great anti-Western powers, not to mention the UN, the so-called “international community”, is unrealistic, totally unrealistic, the most unrealistic thing.

What happens to the “two peoples, two states” thesis resurrected by Blinken and other cheats? A totally empty formula, deceptive because on the one hand there is the state characterized by an unstoppable expansionism, which has come to occupy more than 85% of the territory of historic Palestine, and on the other a dust of tiny bantustans and totally surrounded homelands, between them separated, dependent, without perspective. And does the hypothesis, put forward by others, have a minimum of realism that the end of the colonial occupation could come with the “democratization” of Israel, an Israel without Netanyahu perhaps, led by more moderate rulers? Zero realism, because the constitutive bases, the foundations of Israel are colonialist from the beginning, and aimed at ethnic cleansing and the construction of an apartheid regime implemented with every form of terrorist violence – and in fixing them as such, in theory and in practice, “Labour” Zionism à la Ben Gurion had a special role. Any hypothesis of de-colonization of the state of Israel is therefore a total bluff. And if it is true that ultra-Zionism dominates in that state today, it is only because, faced with multiple internal and international crisis factors, the old Zionism took off its mask and became radicalized.

The formula of free Palestine “from the river to the sea” means, for us, free from colonialism and the colonialist state of Israel which brutally oppresses the Palestinian people there and to keep this oppression standing, it must carry forward a process of fascistization of own structures also towards the Jewish population (wasn’t there shouting in the streets until a few months ago against the rising fascism of Netanyahu & Co.?). It certainly does not mean throwing the Jews into the sea, but rather, as already proposed by the most advanced Palestinian organizations of the 1970s, establishing a state “in which Israelis and Arabs will enjoy the same rights, a state in which there will be no form of oppression, finally, a state in which power, all power, will be exercised by the workers’ and peasants’ soviets”, integrated into a broader Arab federation of peoples free from imperialism and capitalism.

This perspective is, after all, the only realistic perspective, even if to make it become reality it will require an enormous effort of struggle and class organization on an international scale. Moreover, a century of inexhaustible struggle has proven that there is no purely national solution to the Palestinian question. Just as there was no Arab solution either in 1948 or after. Not even with their unlimited heroism have the Palestinian masses been able to free themselves from Zionist colonial oppression, which enjoys a thousand protections and as many complicities in the world of capital – because each of the most powerful capitalist states in the world has, within itself or within its area of ​​influence, forms of national and racial oppression to defend, it has its colony of “Palestinians” to keep at bay. This is why the struggle of the oppressed Palestinian masses must increasingly become the struggle of all the exploited in the world. And that is exactly what is happening in recent months, as a mostly spontaneous result of long-lasting, profound economic-social processes.

From perspective let’s go back to today. The enormous wave of demonstrations of solidarity with Palestine was an event of exceptional political importance. Woe betide you if you minimize its significance. But faced with the breadth and power of the anti-Palestinian “holy alliance”, it has so far failed to stop the genocide in Gaza, the attempt to move its inhabitants from Gaza to the desert or Egypt, and the steady stream of murders targeted and cold-blooded attacks by the army and bloodthirsty settlers in the West Bank. He “simply” completely delegitimized the reasons for the state of Israel in the eyes of endless masses of workers and young people, showing it for what it is: a horrible monster created by colonialism, which cannot in any way be transformed and moderated, can and it just needs to be torn down. Don’t say it’s little. The squares of the world were not filled in vain at all! But to further bring the national and social liberation of the oppressed Palestinians closer, we need to relaunch and radicalize the mobilizations of these two months on a political level – because it is the only way to support the resistance, weaken Israel and take advantage of inter-imperialist contradictions. Enough with the calls for repentance from “our” governments! It will only be the fear of profound damage to one’s economy and legitimacy that will force the established powers, starting with those of the Arab world, to loosen their total or partial complicity with Israel, so as to put a spanner in the wheels of the criminal project of the Netanyahu government. The demand for a total, immediate cessation of supplies of Arab and BRICS oil to Israel must become a key slogan. Here in Italy and in Europe the practice of struggle inaugurated with the blockades, limited for now, of the ports of Genoa and Salerno, developed with the important strike called in logistics by SI Cobas on 17 November last, with the protest of hundreds of trade union activists in England against 4 factories making components for Israeli bombers, in front of Israeli-owned companies as in Modena, or against collaboration agreements between Italian and Israeli companies as in Genoa, with the occupation of universities and schools to force them to sever ties with Zionist institutions, etc.

Finally, as for the “Israeli proletarians” to whom the “internationalists” from sofas & sofas refer with the greatest emphasis, they will prove that they truly exist as proletarians only by separating themselves from their rulers – the proof that they have not given so far, and from which the salvation of their honor will depend. For some time now, Israeli society has begun to divide openly along class lines. A dozen years ago there were mass demonstrations by wage workers against austerity. Moreover, no matter how much support we receive from abroad, the most unbridled militarism, the unlimited development of the death industry, is not possible without the corresponding reduction in the expenses necessary for the protection of social life. In recent months there have been even larger street protests against the process of centralization of power and actual fascistization. But the denunciation of the oppression of the Palestinians has so far remained reserved to a small minority of courageous individuals, without ever seeing an organized presence of proletarian groups. It really is time to tell them: here and now you will have to demonstrate whether you are free men and women or slaves associated with slavers!

The end of the subordination of the “Israeli proletarians” to Zionism will be neither a simple nor a short process, produced by a work of ideological or moral conviction. Israel’s colonialism, the massive financial aid from abroad to support its role as the maximum guarantor of the imperialistic order in the area, have allowed advantages and privileges for the Israeli proletarians themselves which have consolidated over time. This explains, at least in part, why anti-Zionism in Israel is today a rare commodity, reserved for a few individuals with little or no mass following. But it also explains why the possible strengthening of a real internal opposition to the colonial occupation presupposes not the messianic expectation of the “awakening” of the exploited Israelis but, on the contrary, the intensification of Palestinian resistance to the occupation and the all-out struggle for the national self-determination and social emancipation. Only this struggle, and the struggle of the exploited Middle Eastern people, will be able to “set in motion” within Israel the forces potentially hostile to Zionism, forces that the infamous regime keeps chained to itself with the miserable privileges of colonialism. And it is only within this perspective of resistance and attack on the machine of Zionist domination that the questioning of the programmatic tasks of this resistance acquires legitimacy, and what the correct ways of conducting it should be, also from a specifically military point of view. Otherwise it is evasion, escape from the priority task of today which is full support for the Palestinian resistance, and the tireless denunciation of the role of the Meloni government, of the state, of the Italian military and propaganda apparatus in favoring the genocide of the Palestinians and the tragedy of a second Nakba.

The massacre in Gaza fully confirms our prediction of a multiplication of war situations generated by an increasingly profound general crisis of the world order dominated by the United States, Europe and Asian allies. This trend towards war and global barbarism increasingly determines a clear and clear watershed. It happened during the First World War and during and after the Second. It happens again today. If the war in Ukraine has highlighted the irreducible antagonism between the defense of the common interests, immediate and future, of the Russian and Ukrainian proletariat, and the support for one of the imperialist contenders fighting for the partition of Eastern Europe, the Zionist aggression in Gaza highlights every day more and more the incompatibility between authentic support for the Palestinian cause and campist and multipolarist illusions.

It is from this fault line that the action of the revolutionaries and consequent internationalists must develop, with the aim of a recomposition on an international scale of all the political, trade union and social forces that have not capitulated to the sirens of the losing logic of a supposed “lesser evil”. This is an action that must be organized against the trend, because even the strongest and most daring spontaneity cannot be enough. But precisely the last period has shown us that we are not alone in this work: in the four corners of the earth, from South America to Asia, from the Middle East to Africa to the heart of Europe, there are numerous organizations and bodies which, although with different accents and nuances and despite profoundly different historical-ideological affiliations, they show that they can share this classist and internationalist perspective.

The urgent appeal of Palestinian trade unions addressed in mid-October to trade unions around the world to effectively put an end to any complicity with Israel not only for Palestinian liberation but also “for the liberation of all the dispossessed and exploited of the world” , and similar appeals from political bodies from within the Palestinian resistance, have so far had the first significant, but still “local” responses. We believe we need to raise the bar, therefore we propose to all the trade union and political bodies with which we are in contact the organization of an international strike against the state of Israel, the genocide in Gaza and the forced displacement of its population, in support of the cause Palestinian.

December 9, 2023

Revolutionary internationalist tendency

L'articolo [INTERNATIONALISM] Sworn enemies, false friends and true allies of the Palestinian cause, today and in perspective proviene da "TOCCANO UNO TOCCANO TUTTI".