“Neither one State nor two States!  No ‘State’ will end the slaughter of our Class!”

1500 dead in the first day alone – not Ukraine this time but again in the Middle East. 

“If war begets war, it feels like it’s spawning at an alarmingly bloody rate across the globe” was a UK journalists introduction to the outbreak of the Israel/Gaza war.

As if war were a contagiousness natural phenomenon independent of cause and effect.  War does not beget war, capitalism does. 

As French Socialist Jean Juarès said just before WW1: “Capitalism carries war within it, just like clouds carry rain”.

The hypocrisy of those claiming to offer solutions is demonstrated in Turkey’s president Erdogan’s statement inviting “…all parties to act reasonably and to stay away from impulsive steps that raise tensions” just days after bombing Kurdish communities in Rojava, northern Syria.

‘Honest Broker’ the USA promises Israel “We will always have your back”, effectively issuing a blank cheque for a license to kill.

Whole families wiped out in their homes in Gaza; hundreds of kids hunted down on bikes and butchered at a music festival.  The slaughter has become immediately vast and merciless.  We know who is doing the killing, we must ask, who is doing the dying?

People like us, workers, Jew and Arab alike.  Without ownership and control, our class, without power killed by those fighting for it.

The suffering of the Palestinians is an open sore of the West’s stronghold in the Levant.  The Israeli Defence Force (IDF) has been the West’s ‘boots on the ground’ since the ’50’s, playing pivotal roles in such imperialist ventures as the Suez Crisis of ’56.  Armed to the teeth, it wants for nothing.

Despite the Israeli state’s West leaning Democratic credentials, it de facto maintains an apartheid system over the Palestinians, enabling their movement to work when it suits them and locking them in when not.  It’s slow march to the theocratic Right has generated a massive resistance from its own working class.

The tragedy of Gaza is that it rests in the horns of a dilemma. Because of the blockade by the Israeli state, it has been described as the “largest open prison in the world “.  Its further misfortune is to be guarded by the Hamas Islamic Statelet. 

‘Hamas’, meaning ‘Zeal’ is a viscous theocratic dictatorship worse than that which the world has been protesting against in Iran.  As liberals and leftists chant ‘we are all Hamas now’, they might do well to reflect on how long they would survive there. 

Hamas even butchers its own, like Mahmoud Ishtiwi, a former Hamas commander who was, according to the New York Times, “…accused of moral turpitude, by which Hamas meant homosexuality” then was tortured and shot in 2016.

As with the Vietnam Têt Offensive of ’68, this brutal ‘David’ assault on a brutal ‘Goliath’ is an attempt at a paradigm shift.  

It is as much aimed at the Fatah faction of the West Banks Palestinian Authority to usurp its leadership as to scupper Israel’s attempts to freeze the conflict through rapprochement with its Arab neighbours.

While it might seem counter intuitive for Hamas to have united a divided Israeli entity, it may prove a timely exploitation of the West’s focus on the European war to widen the conflict by dragging in an unwilling Iran.

With US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, talking up the potential of Iran’s role, this could go anywhere.  Sending their western Mediterranean Carrier strike force eastwards ‘to deter Iran’ would certainly free up Israel to take on a wider military venture against Irans nuclear program that it has been itching to do.

Whatever the truth, this is not Arab versus Jew, this is workers on both sides slaughtered and manipulated by capitalisms Power Bloc rivalry carried out through their bloody proxies.  Capitalist war, red in tooth and claw!

Neither one state nor two states can end this cycle, no agent of capitalism is able or willing too.  All their wars are against our class.  Class War is our only response which is why there, as in the Ukraine we say resist their drive to war – No War But The Class War!

Article by Dreyfus