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Continuing our series speaking to comrades about what being in the ACN means to them we speak to Rachel from Leeds

How did your first encounter anarchism?

I first encountered Anarchism when I met my partner 10 years ago. I was ignorant about politics, I have always been raised to believe that everyone is equal and I didn’t understand why we needed money and why we didn’t help those who where poor or suffering. I had voted labour a few times but then Tony Blair got in and the Iraq war happened. At this point I started to spoil my ballot paper as there was no-one I felt I could vote for but I believed at this point that voting was the only way of changing things.

When I met my partner, he explained to me what anarchism was and I told him he was naive and laughed at him as I thought it was a nice utopian dream.

This started long period of heated debate and sometimes screaming arguments. I got so annoyed with him in the end as he always “won” the debate I decided to educate my self to prove him wrong.

Well I started with the political compass and learned about left and right, authoritarian and libertarian where the political parties sat on the compass. My partner would answer my questions if I didn’t understand a term or a historical point. I started reading about different political theories and borrowing books from my partner on Anarchism.

To cut a long story short the more I read and understood our debates became conversations then agreement and to my chagrin I realised that I agreed with him I then wanted to be active and do things. It has changed my life and has filled a hole I didn’t realise was there. I have been an “ active” Anarchist now for around 7 or 8 years now.

Do anarchists support terrorism?

For myself I think that direct action that is targeted at the elite or those that are actually the problem big corporations, banks, Govt.

Terrorism seems to me to be about spreading terror and often seems to target the working class and harm innocent folks.

Why is class important?

It is important to recognise the distinct inequalities in our society today and the basis for that.  The fact that the gap between the rich and the poor is getting bigger all the time. Big corporations are getting more and more control over our lives. Capitalism is unsustainable and the planet cannot support ever expanding growth and this headlong greed and drive for profit. The COVID pandemic showed what has always the case in that without the WC and certain key workers society grinds to a halt yet these key workers are often the lowest paid and seen as “unskilled”.

Folks are working 40+ hours a week and still cannot afford to heat their homes or feed their families. Governments are using poverty as a weapon to force folks into low paid bullshit jobs that just increase the profits of the capitalist class and keeps folks stressed and tired jus trying to survive. This combined with right wing  biased media means that folks are not inclined to fight back and they remain disunited.

It is important to recognise how class still divides us and the multiple ways this violence is used against us. We must unite in the struggle to overthrow capitalism

Anarchism, activism and health. How do you remain active when struggling with various physical and mental health problems?

I believe that mutual aid, solidarity are essential. For me knowing that I am not alone, that I am part of a community that sense of belonging and being supported is essential.

So how do we begin making the connection between health and the class struggle, and to what end? I could begin by telling you my personal story about my battles with poor health and other related issues. But as therapeutic as that may be, it would individualise what is in part a societal problem. Our emotional and psychological problems are often consequences of social stratification, patriarchy and the other dysfunctional elements of society.

Just understanding this doesn’t help much in finding ways of coping with the battles we face every single day.

I am sometimes unsure being political is a help or a hindrance.  Sometimes when I am having a bad time, the general status of the world just adds to it. I cant bear to watch or read the news. However I also feel that it is very optimistic we are fighting for freedom and equality so that everyone can live the life they choose and for the world’s resources to be shared equally and in a sustainable way.

So knowing that I’m not the only person who thinks we should be doing it differently and who is angry and appalled at the state of the world, feeling part of a community, having Comrades and friends who think and feel the same as I do It gives me hope. Also feeling that we are trying to make the world a better place helps to feel more in control of a situation where it is easy to feel powerless.

The end

Not sure how I am supposed to conclude but can’t think of anything else so I will simply say

“ Solidarity, anarchy and love Comrades” ✊

The horror of the (largely one sided) slaughter in the Israeli-Gaza war has seized the attention of the world opinion, funneled into this channel by politicians and a salacious media machine.

Have we forgotten the other war in Europe?  Did we ever remember the dozen other wars raging from the Sahel through to Sudan; the (DRC)Congo to Yemen, Nagorno-Karabakh to Myanmar?

The slaughterhouse is worldwide.  Where our attention is led is as political as the conflicts themselves.  The Ukraine is the West’s new bastion on Europe’s eastern frontier, Israel, it historic one in the Middle East.  

That the Islamist jihadis of Hamas committed unspeakable atrocities can only be denied by fellow Islamist fanatics, fascists and anti-Semites.  The more important question than how did they get out from the Gaza siege is how they ended up controlling Gaza in the first place?  The answer paradoxically is Israel.

For 30 years from the 1970s onwards, Israel’s Palestine policy backed by the West, was the eradication of the secular resistance to the occupation.  National Liberation and Pan-Arabism was seen at the height of the Cold War as a military arm of Soviet foreign policy.

Their war against the Fatah and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PLFP) factions of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), included mass detentions without trial, assassinations at home and abroad and the bloody invasion of Lebanon in 1982.  Their successful expulsion of the PLO cost 30,000 lives, including 3.000 civilians massacred by their Christian militia allies at Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Beirut. 

It suited this policy to encourage the emerging Islamist opposition to sow division to further undermine the PLO and force them into negotiations.  The Oslo Accords from 1993 turned fighters into civil administrators of what became the Palestinian Authority.

30 years of peace withering on the vine followed with broken promises, continuing evictions and illegal settlement, backed by brute force and discrimination.  A de facto two tier one state system rather than the two state ‘solution’.

The analogy of the South African ‘Apartheid’ regime is often drawn.  Racism is as rife in Israel as anywhere else.  It also has a hierarchy of European Jews, East European Jews, airlifted East African Jews, and ‘other’ Jews. The relations inside it are torn by racism even within the Jewish communities.  Racism is even more focused on the 20% of Israelis who are Arabs, against whom the far right – with representatives in the government – is calling for attacks on, regardless of age.

The occupied Palestinian diaspora don’t even register enough for categorisation for a ‘separate development’ plan as under apartheid.  Analogy serves less well than the reality of occupation, racism and discrimination.  Whatever words one searches for to describe it are less relevant than the impact – pain, dislocation and despair.  Hopelessness defies analogy.

Against this background emerged a largely compliant Palestinian administration and the rebellious zealots of Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon.  Occupation, periodic rebellion, terrorism and repression have ruled ever since.

Israel’s decade long march to the populist right has added fuel to the tinder and October 7th saw the ignition.  The Israeli Rights hubristic sense of superiority through provocation left it blind to this barbaric assault.

“This is the battle of civilisation” Nentanyahu announced on the eve of invasion that will hugely add to the 16,000 existing casualties, including 4,000 dead in Gaza and 75 on the West Bank. 

The assault is already relentless.  While the culprit of the Al-Ahli Hospital bombing may be disputed, that Israel has continued to bomb southern Gaza despite forcing 1 million people to move down there for safety, is not.

Hamas has said it is not holding hostages, just “prisoners of war”, including children, babies, the elderly and disabled.  Both sides see everyone as a combatant.  The workers of the ‘Palestinian Street’ are as vulnerable (if more numerous) as the youths slaughtered by Hamas at a peace festival to the warmongers of the Israeli state and the Hamas Islamic Statelet.

The ruthless hypocrisy of capitalist power and their wars is demonstrated in the Wests response.  While suspiciously quiet about their war in Ukraine – perhaps grateful for the diversion from Ukraine’s failing offensive – they line up as Gaza is flattened to praise Israel for what they denounced war crimes in Ukraine.

That two nuclear armed states are invading their neighbours should terrify us all.  Especially as this conflict risks drawing Iran in, Russia’s s principle ally in its invasion and an aspiring nuclear power itself.  Such a situation could tempt the US, through its proxy Israel, to kill two birds with one stone while protecting Israeli skies and quietening Russian forces in Syria with its carrier fleet off the Israeli coast.

They want us to see only one war.  We might start joining the dots if we linked the totality of what’s going on.  Their drive to war is real and growing, the casualties on all sides of those conflicts will be the same.  People like us, workers and producers with no stake in the system and everything to lose.

At home we pay through austerity, our will fight against it is also the fight against their wars, their capacity to fight war, our refusal to fight it for them.  No war but the class war must be our response!

Article by Dreyfus

Via our Comrades TŘÍDNÍ VÁLKA # CLASS WAR

The attack by Hamas on Israel on Saturday, October 7, has provoked an immediate military response from the Netanyahu government, which has declared a state of war and has begun the systematic bombardment of the Gaza Strip. Meanwhile, under the cheers of the regime of the Ayatollahs’, Hezbollah has taken advantage of the situation by launching missiles into Israel from the Lebanese border. The confrontation has already (October 9) caused more than a thousand deaths between the Israeli State and the Gaza Strip, in addition to thousands of wounded and kidnapped. The coming days and months will see the misery and suffering of the workers on both sides increase, aggravating the harsh general conditions of the majority of the population, both those of the Strip and the impoverished proletariat of Israel.

And in addition to the misery that the Palestinian proletarians have to endure both inside and outside the Strip, under the existing segregation regime in Israel, there is a more general process of pauperization of the proletariat in the region as a whole after the covid pandemic and the beginning of the war in Ukraine: a rise in the price of raw materials, of energy and of food which already keeps half of the Arab families in Israel, more than a fifth of the Jewish families and practically the entire population in Gaza —that large refugee camp that maintains itself with the crumbs of the United Nations— under the threshold of poverty.

What has led Hamas to act now? Certainly not the defense of the interests of the proletariat in Gaza, who once again find themselves under Israeli bombardment. Its surprise attack, which has come to intensify an already long-standing conflict, cannot be understood as a response motivated by popular rage against the Israeli occupation. There is no “Palestinian people”, nor an undifferentiated unit of aggrieved people who respond heroically to their old aggressors. The proletariat in Gaza which just a few months ago was protesting against the Hamas regime, against power cuts, food shortages and the government’s fierce repression, does not share the same interests as the apparatus subordinate to the Ayatollahs’ regime, nor the “brave” militias that use the civilian population of both sides as human shields. The Israeli response to the attack may revive the nationalist closing of ranks on both sides of the conflict, but it cannot deny this fact.

Because it must be said clearly and distinctly: the forces at work on both the Palestinian and Israeli sides are profoundly reactionary. Since the very formation of the State of Israel in 1948, the region has not ceased to be one piece more on the chessboard of the global inter-imperialist struggle. Israel quickly positioned itself as a pawn in the service of U.S. interests. Since then, whether under Ben-Gurion’s Labor Party or under the various conservative governments, it has pursued a systematic segregation and repression of the Palestinians within and outside of its borders, as well as a militaristic and securitarian policy that has served up til now to divert attention from the profound social inequalities within the Jewish population. For their part, the various factions of Palestinian nationalism after the British Mandate emerged under the auspices of the pan-Islamism of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and later under the secular umbrella of Stalinism under Nasser, to pass on after the fall of the USSR to be under the orders of Iran as a regional power. In the form of political Islamism or Stalinism, the military apparatus of Palestinian nationalism has always been linked to the most reactionary manifestations of the 20th century. After all, it could not be otherwise: As Rosa Luxemburg had already pointed out decades earlier in her debate with Lenin, any nationalist movement can only, outwardly, fall under the wing of one of the great powers in the imperialist struggle, and inwardly repress all class expression in order to fix internal cohesion against the national enemy.

For reaction feeds reaction, and both need each other. Whether Netanyahu had any knowledge or not of the Hamas attack, whether he ignored or underestimated its magnitude or directly decided to allow it to happen, in any case it has not failed to be very convenient for him to favor a closing of ranks in the midst of a political crisis of his government while he himself is threatened with a corruption trial.

For their part, Hamas and Hezbollah, like the Iranian regime itself, obtain as such a moment of respite from the growing social discontent in the three territories, which in Lebanon was expressed by the slogan of All of them means all of them —that is, also Hezbollah— during the 2019 protests and which in Iran has been propelling strikes and mobilizations since 2018, exploding last year in the protests against the hijab mandate following the assassination of Mahsa Amini.

In its terminal crisis, capitalism not only drives social misery and the devastation of the planet to ever greater levels, thus motivating processes of social polarization, but also accentuates the confrontation between the different powers for the domination of a world market with ever greater dysfunctionalities. At the same time that capitalism expels labor and makes the material reproduction of our lives more and more difficult, it turns us into cannon fodder at the service of the interests of one fraction of the bourgeoisie against another. In this logic of inter-imperialist struggle, Hamas has acted with the aim of torpedoing the rapprochement between Israel and Saudi Arabia, hindering a new regional configuration in accordance with the tensions between the imperialist blocs. Under the banner of the “Palestinian resistance”, it simply obeys the necessities of a part of the regional bourgeoisie. The blood that is spilled however, will continue to be that of the Palestinian and Israeli proletariat. Any concession to nationalism, any deference to one nation over another in this process, implies placing oneself on the other side of the barricade against our class, which has no homeland and whose only real possibility of improving its living conditions is to put an end to the very system that threatens it, in an increasingly flagrant manner. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict will not find its solution in the creation of a single bi-national state, nor in the constitution of an independent Palestinian state. It can only find its solution in a revolutionary process that breaks with every nation and every border.

When at night the anti-aircraft sirens sound, and the Israeli and Palestinian military apparatuses hold their population hostage under bombs, we revolutionaries oppose this barbarism with all our strength. To the flags of nationalism, no matter the color of each one, we counterpose the joint struggle of the Palestinian and Israeli workers. For the Israelis, their bitterest enemy is the apparatus of the Jewish state, just as the PNA and Hamas are implacable enemies of the Palestinians. Only by confronting them directly will they be able to get out of the hellish labyrinth in which they find themselves. In short, against imperialist war – and this is one – there is only room for its transformation into a class war.

Translated in English by Malcontent Editions

Source in English: https://barbaria.net/2023/10/10/against-israeli-and-palestinian-nationalism/

Source in Spanish: https://barbaria.net/2023/10/09/contra-el-nacionalismo-palestino-e-israeli/

This statement was produced following the Varna International gathering of anti authoritarian groups in September. It has been co signed by our comrades in France [ASAP] and Bulgaria [FCAB] and was in response to the war in Ukraine. Its release was delayed as recent events took precedence, but is relevant to any war, conflict or state violence.

Please feel free distribute this graphic in your networks.

Israel demands the exodus of a million Palestinians in 24 hours, in a sickening parody of biblical proportions.

Netanyahu’s gambit in Gaza is taken directly from the playbook of Putin and Assad.  Collective punishment through annihilation. 

The dictatorial destruction of Grozny, Aleppo and Mariupol is reenacted in the democratic ‘free world’s’ endorsement of the destruction of Gaza.

Like the movie Face Off, umasked, capitalist ‘democracy’ and capitalist dictatorship look interchangeable.

We could all be forgiven for thinking only one war was going on. It seems global media can only focus on one at a time. The 150,000 dead in the European war are shunted to one side.  The West is addressing another of its global rivalry priorities while Zelensky lambasts them for turning their gaze.

The movement of British naval forces to join those the USA has already brought in from the eastern Mediterranean to protect Israel, (though clearly not from a Gazan air force!) suggests another gambit is in play.  It happens to be within range of Russia’s Mediterranean fleet at the Syrian port of Tartus.

Israel’s bombing of Damascus and Aleppo airports in Syria has barely received a mention.  They have targeted what they see as Iranian assets in that country.  This suggests old scores may be addressed in this fog of war and under the protection of a power bloc sponsor.

Two other faces have also become interchangeable, the agony and despair of our class on both sides.  The massacre at the Be’eri Kibbutz sits alongside that of the Ukrainian village of Bucha in the graveyard of our illusions.  The good guys and the bad are also interchangeable.

Whilst anti-semitism is disturbingly on the rise throughout Europe and beyond, and racism from warring actors adds fuel to the fire, behind the divisions here is clearly the theme of national concept and religious difference.

The holding and subjection to the act or threat of violence of hostages is iconic of the barbarism of this conflict. The Islamic fundamentalist Mullahs of Hamas ordered the stealing of our class for their gain. Israel’s far right religious orthodox minister of National Security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, has supported settler violence against Palestinians. He has also called for “cruel punishment” retribution against Arabs.

His sidelining to enable a unity government has led to no softening of rhetoric.  His stand-in as new Defence Minister, Benny Gants, stated that Israel was fighting “human animals”.  An ‘othering’ that permits 2 million people being deprived of food, water, power and medicine – clearly not needed in a desert of rubble.

As this conflict continues to unmask, we see the political extremes of those orthodox faith views are mutually interchangeable too.

Hamas has 150 captive hostages in Gaza.  The Israeli state has more than 2 million.  For Israel, the paramount safety of is hostages is a red herring as it acquires ‘bunker-busting’ munitions to destroy the tunnels they are probably held in.

The son of an elderly Jewish peace activist kidnapped by Hamas was asked what he thought his mother would think. He said, “she would be horrified.  You can’t cure dead babies with more dead babies.”  A powerful heartfelt sentiment full of innate humanity.

One that would resonate as strongly either side of this conflict line. That would resonate as strongly in Ukraine and Russia.  The players are essentially the same, the loser in both is our class. These conflicts are interchangeable too!

War is always against our class. No war is legitimate except our Class War against it!

By Dreyfus

 

 

Continuing our series speaking to comrades about what being in the ACN means to them we speak to Ash from Manchester

What drew you to revolutionary activism?

That’s the cart before the horse!  I wasn’t ‘drawn’ to ‘it’!  As a queer teenager in the late ’70’s I found myself ‘illegal’ and in a life and death struggle.  The early Thatcher years of the AIDS pandemic.  Coming together as lesbian, trans, queer, or simply being young, didn’t feel like a choice, it seemed to present itself to me out of necessity.

Why would that need to be revolutionary when you were seeking equality under the law?

The answer is in the question!  We were virtually underground.  Most in our communities actually were underground, genuinely clandestine.  Those of us who weren’t were not going to be left to die.  Being allowed to be ‘under’ anything else to me seemed ridiculous.  The state, church, system, wouldn’t even let us bury our dead!  It wasn’t difficult to feel the whole rotten shop was in need of burning down!

But why Class Struggle Anarchism?

There’s another kind??  I’m not obsessed with the word anarchist.  As for Class Struggle, ie anti-capitalist internationalism, without that it’s just liberalism.  I demand to be free, not request it.   I’m equally happy with libertarian communist.  Basically, nonhierarchical community over Capital. By that I mean capitalism – the wage labour slave system that you can sometimes survive in but never escape.  Being truly human and accepting exploitation by the bosses are not compatible.

And you believe that’s possible?  Isn’t that just too idealistic – Utopian even?

Wow! The day we give up on a humanity with ideals is the day I guess I stop being human!  There has never been a time where people haven’t imagined a better world without poverty or exploitation. That ‘thin red line’ of resistance that has always shown itself.  Communities of struggle.  For me, those who believe that this system that is driving us to global annihilation through war, poverty and climate change works are the utopians.

You talk of ‘community’, what do you mean?   What might a different society look like?

We all have an experience of its potential in our daily lives. Our humanity constantly asserts itself.  Struggling and consequently incomplete.  I would say the abolition of greed and scarcity, inclusion and direct involvement, mutual aid in the safety of social solidarity.  When I’m asked this question, I usually say look at the relationships and communities around you that you have chosen or are able to create.  They’re opposite of all the relationships we are expected to see as normal in the 50 years most of our waking life is spent trying not to become homeless or hungry.  Friends, neighbours, family.  Places of voluntary engagement like community centres, sports, cultural and social groups.  Charities, food banks, choirs  etc  We know what it is to be in non-hierarchical or exploitative relationships.

After 40 odd years of activism, what do you think is most different now?

Urgency.  40 odd years ago class struggle here was a continuous unbroken tradition.  My parents were the children of miners and council workers.  Change had always been sought, always needed, always believed in. Despite the Cold War there wasn’t the sense that time is running out as there is now.

It is no longer a future dystopian fantasy to imagine that the generation which will witness our extinction is already here. 

Interview by ACN

From our Comrades Tridni Valka

“The position of revolutionaries confronted with capitalist war is always the same: to oppose social revolution to war, to struggle against ‘their own’ bourgeoisie and ‘their own’ national state.”

GCI-ICG, The Invariance of the Revolutionary Position on War: The Meaning of Revolutionary Defeatism – Communism No.12

October 7^th, 2023 – another day of a bloody, decades-long conflict between opposing capitalist factions in the territory of “Israel/Palestine”. Our bourgeois masters are once again pushing our proletarian brothers and sisters to murder each other and expect us – depending on where we live – to rally in support of one or the other side.

Hamas and Islamic Jihad are launching rockets against the towns in “Israel” as well as sending their militias to go street by street and execute or kidnap “civilians” and “soldiers”… just like what happened in Srebrenica, in Sabra and Shatila, in Bucha…

IDF is bombing and shelling indiscriminately across the Gaza ghetto, flattening whole neighborhoods, as well as cutting off the supply of water, electricity, food, medicine… just like what happened in Fallujah, in Homs, in Mariupol… or just like it did so many times before.

We have heard justifications for support of the war in the territory of “Palestine/Israel” many times – perhaps more than any other conflict since the WW2 is this one portrayed as a “Holy War” between “good and evil”. We see this warmongering bourgeois argumentation coming from media, politicians, “right”, “left” and “ultra-left” as well as some of the so-called “communists” and “anarchists”.

The bourgeois ideological construct of “Israeli/Jewish exceptionalism” is tossed around both in a positive and in a negative sense and used by our class enemies to prevent, hinder and crush the development of the class solidarity between “Jewish/Israeli” and “Arab/Palestinian” proletarians.

On one hand “Jews/Israelis” are allowed to defend their “state and identity” even by some of those that claim to be revolutionaries and to oppose all states and national identities, because they “uniquely suffered” during the Holocaust.

On the other hand, different groups that also claim to be revolutionaries and to “fight for the working class interests” never extend their call for fraternization to “Jewish/Israeli” proletarians and instead lump them together with their “own” bourgeoisie and call for destruction of Israel as “uniquely oppressive state”. At the same time, instead of supporting the proletarians in Gaza and West Bank to rise up against their “own” exploiters, they call for a support of the “Palestinian” national state.

As communists, we totally reject all false communities that try to unite the exploited with their exploiters; the proletariat in the territory of “Israel/Palestine” has no common interests with its “own” bourgeoisie, just as global proletariat has no common interests with global bourgeoisie!

“Anti-imperialism” and “national liberation” are nothing else than defense of imperialist interests of that faction of the bourgeoisie, that is not currently dominant. Nothing changes in this regard, if that side is much weaker, or if some of its leaders are willing to sacrifice themselves for their cause!

As communists, we call for a destruction of all states equally, as they are nothing else than the local expression of the global capitalist State, a structure of organized violence of the bourgeois class against the proletarian class!

Proletarians in the “Israeli” forces – you have no interest in defending any “Jewish Homeland”, it is a land of “your” bourgeoisie, not yours! Refuse to shoot and refuse to enforce the blockade that is starving millions of your class brothers and sisters. As you have shown many times before, refuse to follow the orders, resist the military service!

Proletarians in the “Palestinian” forces – you have no country to conquer! Refuse to kill or be killed for the interests of your exploiters!

Proletarians on the “home” front – how many times have you suffered bombing, shelling, shooting? How many times you were violently repressed by your “own” State when you dared to strike or protest? For how long have you lived in misery? Rise up and refuse to support “your” State and its wars, you can lose nothing but your chains!

In “Palestine/Israel” as well as in “Ukraine”, “Azerbaijan/Armenia”, “Sudan” and elsewhere, our class enemies are turning us either into cannon fodder or into cannon makers. More and more, all these “local” bourgeois conflicts are helping with the formation of few opposing super-blocks, that are coming closer and closer to the open, possibly nuclear, military confrontation. Confrontation that has potential to end all life on this planet.

Our only hope is to turn the weapons against our “own” generals, against our “own” bosses, to refuse to obey the orders, to refuse to produce the war materials – to oppose both the carnage of the capitalist war and the misery of the capitalist interbellum (or as our class enemies call it “peace”)!

Let’s take the example from our comrades that mutinied in “Russia” and “Germany” against the slaughter of the WW1, or those that fraternized across the trench line in the war between “Iraq” and “Iran”, or those in the “American” uniforms during the war in “Vietnam” “fragging” their officers!

Proletarians with and without uniform, let’s organize together against the capitalist system of exploitation of the human labor that lies in the root of all the misery, all the State oppression and all the wars!

Let’s turn this war into class war for the global communist revolution!

Class War – October 8^th, 2023

From Gaza to Tel-Aviv and to the whole World… No War But Class War!

Tridni Valka – Class War

How do you live 
How do you die
A war between states
The working class die

Our brothers and Sisters across the world.
Degenerate patriotism, flags unfurled
Swallowing all the news tells us
Believe this or that but make no fuss

Political apathy, thousands die.
Thoughts and prayers pie in the sky!
National flags on your profile
Taking sides such Statist bile!

War about money, war about power
War about oil, war about Land
No peace between classes
The world is burning make a stand.

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