Globally, there are 32 countries currently in armed conflict. The types of conflict vary widely. While the severity and duration of these conflicts differ, they all have significant impacts on our class and result in a high number of casualties as well as humanitarian crises. The common factor is capitalism and its local state proxies.
Gaza, despite being so small it would disappear in any of the battlefronts currently taking place in Ukraine, has nonetheless pushed that war out of the public mind – for now. What characterizes both is the hypocrisy and double standards of all involved.
Gaza must rank along with Khorramshahr, Vukovar, Sarajevo, Grozny, Aleppo and Mariupol in the great urban annihilations of the last 50 years. Though atrocity it seems remains in the eye of the beholder.
On November 5th, in an act of self-promotion to his West Bank settler constituency, Israel’s now suspended Heritage Minister, Amichai Eliyahu, said on Hebrew language radio station that “…throwing a nuclear bomb on Gaza was one of the possibilities”.
This normalisation of nuclear rhetoric is also characteristic on both the Ukraine and Gaza conflicts. Such threats at the moment underplay the enormity of the ‘conventional’ violence currently deployed. Already, the destruction of Gaza has detonated the explosive equivalent of 2 Hiroshima bombs.
And while Gaza takes the attention, 40 raids a day are taking place in the occupied West Bank leading to thousands of detentions, land grabs and 170 deaths.
The window of opportunity for the Israeli state’s collective punishment of Palestinian workers and destruction of Hamas is however, narrowing. More of its erstwhile allies (France, Canada, it’s Arab ‘friends’) are increasingly forced by popular anger to call for a ceasefire.
The Gaza conflict will likely end sooner rather than later. And, as Israel demands the emptying of hospitals and further mass movements from south to west, more with a bang than a whimper.
The sooner this happens the less likely an escalation that Israel doesn’t choose itself – though the ending of conflict on one front may be a great temptation to open a new one to finish the job long anticipated against Iran’s regional power and nuclear program.
As ethnic cleansing in Azerbaijan and a new genocide unfolding in Darfur slip under the radar, Ukraine can expect a repeat of last year’s winter bombing campaign, aimed at the country’s energy grid.
Since June 4th, the NATO sponsored Ukrainian offensive has progressed only 10km at its deepest point. While the front remains active, the war there has lost any pretense of mobility. Winter has come again as will the literal and metaphorical freeze of the front lines.
On November 1st in an interview in the Economist magazine, this reality was acknowledged by Ukrainian commander-in-chief, Valerii Zaluzhnyi: “Just like in the first world war, we have reached the level of technology that puts us into a stalemate.”
This will strategically benefit Putin allowing a reconstruction of the defensive lines of the meat grinder, and providing respite from the equally high casualty rate that the Russian army has recklessly suffered in defence.
But the Russian state’s challenge of recruitment has led to increasingly perverse and sinister abuse not just of Russian workers but prisoners of war.
On November 7th Russia announced it was sending Ukrainian captives to the front lines of their country to fight on Moscow’s side in the war
The Russian state news agency RIA Novosti reported the Ukrainians will operate as part of another unit in eastern Ukraine, and the unit’s website said it has about 7,000 fighters.
Video shows the Ukrainian POWs in uniform swearing allegiance to Russia and are expected to be deployed to the front lines in the Donetsk and Zaporizhzhia regions.
The ‘Rules of War’ like genocidal atrocity are equally in the eye of the beholder.
If either conflict escalates, it would present a real risk that these wars will cross-pollinate each other and merge their violence. Iran, Turkey, and the West already have their feet firmly planted in both conflicts. The wider Middle East cauldron is ripe for ignition.
The risks to our class, like the scale of our losses and suffering, have not diminished in the two years of conflict. Rather they have escalated and the urgency of resistance increases.
The resistance begins on the home front. Wherever we find ourselves we can oppose the narratives that draw us towards support for one side or the other! We can assert our needs against their war profiteering and austerity in our workplaces and communities.
We can challenge their attempts to divide us on employment status, race, immigration status, gender, identity, sexuality, disability. Our communities are stronger for our diversity.
We must pose our class war against their exploitation and war against our class in all its forms. This is what we mean by the practical manifesto: No War but the Class War!
Despite a chill in the air and winter on the horizon, the ACN attended its 6th bookfair of the year. Organised by the Lighthouse Bookshop in Edinburgh, the final day of the 4-day event attracted a couple of hundred people through the doors to browse the various stalls and engage in a variety of discussions. These included: the lack of community control and input over public health policy in capitalism; attacks upon women, in particular with regard to bodily autonomy; enforced poverty and oppression among communities globally.
During the day, it became evident that as is often found currently within leftist gatherings, there was a general omission of discussion regarding the need for working class internationalism and of the universality and centrality of class exploitation and oppression, in all its forms – and the need to mobilise on this basis. In contrast to this though, we managed to distribute several dozen of our publications, including having them placed at the various stalls and given out in person, whilst getting a nice welcome from the organisers spoken to. The literature then initiated at least the beginnings of a hopefully ongoing productive dialogue around revolutionary class based, anti-statist and anti-militarist, emancipatory politics, with both some of the organisers and a number of the attendees, authors and speakers. These conversations encompassed the need for resistance from our class to ongoing attacks upon our living standards and environmental destruction, as well as to the murderous wars in the Middle East, Eastern Europe and those potentially in the future, closer to “home”, by the current system of state and capital.
From Sheffield early in the year to Glasgow in the spring, from Hull and Bradford in the summer to Manchester / Salford and now, Edinburgh, in the autumn – we have been busy arranging and/or attending bookfairs throughout this year. Moreover, we continue to organise and attempt to reach out to our class, especially to potentially like-minded people in our communities and workplaces, locally through to internationally alike.
We note with anger and derision the fanfare being made at a fall in the rate of inflation as if it were pennies from heaven!
In whose straw poll do hands shoot up to the question ‘have you noticed your pay/benefits/tax credits outstripping inflation?’
The way the current pundits portray the reduction in the rate of inflation as a beneficial experience in our daily lives is a complete fiction. The rate of increases in prices has slowed a little. Prices are not coming down our lives are not becoming more affordable.
The causes of inflation are invariably political, the result of choices of who pays for capitalist crisis. Those in power, those with the money make those choices. The rest of us choose between heating, clothing, accommodation and food.
All over the country, record numbers are queueing at food banks, warm hubs and social supermarkets. These voluntary institutions themselves being clear that they are increasingly unable to fulfill their remit, with rising running costs and costs of goods, production, delivery etc.
The pound in our pocket buys a third less than a decade ago. Nearly 15% less than two years ago.
Whatever measly increase in our wages they have given, still less in the paltry level of benefits, may look like on paper now inflation is claimed at 4.6%, it is nothing but a charade of smoke and mirrors.
It hides the reality that our standard of living has declined and our struggle to survive has grown harder since the great banking collapse of 2008.
And it’s not just about numbers on paper, it’s about the disappearance of services of social value to meet the needs of working-class people and our communities.
It’s no good being able to afford your heating if you can’t afford your home! You may be able to buy a cushion, but you can’t afford the sofa; if you can afford dental care, you can’t find an NHS dentist, if you can afford your medication, the treatment to remove your need for it is put of further and further into the future for the absence of doctors and medical care.
As for social care, disability aids, childcare, mental health services, children’s activities, holidays, well, most just can’t have access for love nor money.
And of course, it’s the poor and marginalised to take the blame. Too lazy to work, not really unfit. Refugees gaming the system while our government games Rwanda. Banks raking-in interest driven profits while the homeless make selfish lifestyle choices.
Perhaps little highlights the lies behind the cost of living more than the unacceptable cost of dying. It’s no wonder our TV screens of full of adverts for “we’ll come and take your body away and deliver back your ashes by van for a fraction of the cost”.
It’s hardly surprising that we can’t afford to live with dignity when we can’t even afford to die with it!
Where has all the money that is supposedly unavailable, gone? We know it’s there; we produced it through our work, our skills, through the labours of our minds and bodies.
It is there, not hiding, but in plain sight. The billions that aren’t personally Rishi’s and his friends, we see blowing up Gaza and Ukraine every day. Making room for more profit-making expansion plans. The profit driven inflation claimed back from us through austerity.
The poverty of our daily lives is a reflection of the poverty of morality and values of the capitalist class and its proxies. The only good news about inflation is that it ends with the end of capitalism.
Thanks to the organisers of the Manchester & Salford Anarchist Bookfair for enabling a successful event with around 30 stalls and 8 workshops in the great surrounds of the Peoples History Museum.
The was our second attendance as AnarCom and very different from our first. Last time, just a couple of months after coming together as internationalist activists we were barely known, with few materials, bar a couple of newsletters, with which to engage.
This year, 14 months of coming together and a month before the anniversary of our formal constitution, we were widely recognised, welcomed and able to present a full body of work we have produced to a receptive gathering.
We had arranged to form a NWBTCW block with our close working comrades of the CWO, Friends of Working Class Struggle (FOWCS) and Old Moles Collective, which comedically became referred to as ‘Class Reductionist Corner!’
We had a wide range of our own publications including four of the pamphlets and the last five issues our newsletter, as well as new badges and banners.
It was very well attended and busy throughout the day enabling us to be continuously engaged with attendees and new and old comrades alike.
With 120 of our newsletters distributed as well as other items, and a vibrant social media presence throughout the day, we represented a solid Class Struggle Internationalist presence at the event.
The three of us who attended had a great day and are delighted to see a consequent increase in following and communication since. Thanks to the organisers and to all those who came to see us for making it such a successful day.
The bloodletting of our class is continuous. The attention on where we are bleeding changes to where Capitalist power bloc dynamics directs media focus.
While genocidal ethnic cleansing of Gaza marches apace, up to 8,000 Russian conscripts have died in a fruitless offensive on the Donetsk town of Avdiika.
More are now being thrown back into the meat grinder of Bakhmut. As winter threatens to re-freeze the frontlines, Russia, perhaps taking from Israel’s playbook has stepped up the shelling of civilian centres.
On November 1st shells rained down on 118 settlements in 10 different regions – the most widespread bombardment this year. Putin started a war he didn’t need and now can’t afford a peace.
All eyes though are on the Gaza War which, while barely a month old, has reached some grim new milestones. The accepted figures for civilian deaths have now exceeded those verified in the Ukraine war according to the OHCHR, (Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights). More children have been killed than in all the armed conflicts of the last year put together.
On November 1st, bragging of atrocity, Hamas foreign affairs spokesman Ghazi Hamad said of October 7th: “…we will do this again and again…Nobody should blame us for the things we do… everything we do is justified”.
On the same day their political leader Ismail Haniyeh claimed, like a surprised civilian, that Netanyahu is trying to keep himself out of prison by choosing to invade Gaza!
As if they weren’t the butchers who planned the slaughter of October 7th! They might have missed it from their safe houses in Lebanon and Doha – accustomed as all dictators to let others do the dying.
But they know what all Israelis know, Netanyahu can’t afford a peace either. He doesn’t want this war to end. With Hamas, he is holding a wolf by its ears! He dare not let go. His failure as ‘Mr Security’ is destined to break his political carrier once the Gaza War finishes.
After that he is likely, no longer protected by tenure under the constitution, to face a successful if long delayed trial for corruption in office. A long war, and/or a consequent constitutional crisis resulting in a State of Emergency prolonging powers, is his only route through HIS crisis.
He has failed, against public protest, to limit the oversight powers of the Supreme Court. Combine with this the historic failure of any ‘democratic’ state to suppress insurrection by force of arms alone (Algeria, Vietnam, Ireland, Iraq), and the equation is bleak.
Netanyahu’s need for a wolf suggests a long war and a deepening of crisis towards a
constitutional coup. Failing that, a new war for which Iran might suffice. Capitalist War and a State repression may pose themselves as the saviour of liberal democracy.
Despite the fiction of due diligence to protect the innocent, all limits and scope of action have been abolished. Bunker busting munitions level refugee camps killing hostages in Hamas tunnels. Gaza hospitals are shut down and refugees targeted whether an area is designated ‘safe’ or not.
Even away from Gaza, the Israeli Right is arming Jewish citizens and settlers as vigilantes roaming the West Bank to steal more land, murdering 130 Palestinians in the process. The level of violence has even alarmed the Israeli security service, the ‘Shin Bet’ who warn there could be no limit to the escalation at home.
As the Israeli economy crumbles like civilian infrastructure, cost is no obstacle either. It is estimated the war is costing Israel $246m a day totaling around $7 billion to date. That is 1.5% of GDP a month. A so far short-lived conflict on a small scale has already reached epic proportions.
We know who’s fighting, we know who’s dying and we know who’s paying – our class! Conscripted, manipulated or brutalised to die for those either in power or seeking it. The propaganda on all sides is designed to stop us recognising we are the only ones who can stop it.
Workers of the Levant and across the region, as in Ukraine and Russia and across the globe have nothing to gain. We all know those who do, capitalism and its global proxies as state actors.
Our own efforts at home, fighting where we have something to gain, against the barbarity of wage slavery or unemployment, poverty and austerity, homelessness and repression is where we have the power to end their wars. Smashing their Social Peace at home weakens their capacity to wage war abroad.
Organising on the basis of autonomy, solidarity and mutualism and merging our struggles and demands independent of those who, whilst feigning opposition to war, want to become our alternative leaders.
The leftists and liberals of the anti-war campaigns aren’t against capitalist war, they just want to corral us in the direction of the partisan state entity they support under the guise of anti/imperialism or national liberation. Have us serve in another state, meeting the needs of some other claimant to power.
“From the river to the sea…” comes the hackneyed old slogan of these leftist state apologists. Whether it be from the river Jordan to the Mediterranean or the Donets to the Black Sea, no people can be free dominated by capitalism and its warring states.
What awaits us should we fail is shown to us daily in Ukraine, Palestine and Israel, and in the dozens of other conflicts where our attention is not being directed.
We call for No War But The Class War to end this slaughter and liberate our class from lives of threat and misery. We continue to build alliances within and across our class, and with other internationalist militants where we find them to work towards this end.
‘War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.” 1984
What happened in Israel three weeks ago on October 7th was an unmitigated atrocity. It exposed the horror and brutality of the Islamist fanatics of Hamas against Israeli Jews and non-Jews alike.
Not just in slaughter, but in the most egregious and indiscriminate taking of hostages since the Islamic State’s enslavement of the Yazidis of Northern Iraq in 2014.
What has happened since is a continuing surreal nightmare taking horror to new heights. If not a genocide in legal terms, a de-facto attempt at an annihilation of a society.
Total darkness, no water, food, medicine, power or shelter. Just the choking smoke amongst the raging fires and roar of tanks and missiles. The bombs that rain down sanctified as legitimate self defence by the West.
Yet still the press asks ‘is this the real invasion’ as if there is something else to see! We have long been misdirected to see or not see things in the Middle East to suit the narrative of capitalism’s rival power blocs:
A peaceful liberal secular democracy, ‘like us’, instead of a rabidly right-wing theocratic entity armed to the teeth, dividing its own people.
An insatiable refugee rabble clawing with ruthless violence at the face of civilisation rather than the wretched impoverished diaspora of three generations of State engineered trauma.
All the bluff, lies and delusions of the Ukraine war are exposed in the hypocrisy of the Gaza war. The two-faced solution to who is being slaughtered, how and where, is the politics of capitalist barbarism.
The scale of this catastrophe dwarfs what has come before. The displaced of this Nakba (‘Catastrophe’) is twice that of 1948. Gaza deaths are already more than 2/3rds the recorded civilian deaths in the 20 months of war in Ukraine. 7,500 compared to 10,000 according to the figures of OHCHR, (the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights) and the Gaza Health Ministry.
While Israel disputes these figures from a Hamas source, a wide range of international NGOs and the UN are saying that in general they have found their figures and those of the Gaza Ministry of Health tend to tally and are credible. 40% of these deaths are children.
The workers in the ‘open air Gaza prison’ are not Hamas, who number around 30.000 out of 2.6 million people. The workers of Israel, Jews and Arabs, are not the Israeli State. On the eve of invasion only 29% polled supported a land incursion!
Peace negotiator Gershon Baskin said in an interview on the hostage negotiations “A state’s primary function is to provide security to its citizens”. A State’s primary definition is it’s ‘monopoly on the use of violence.’
Both have found themselves not satisfied with merely monopolising their violence within their own borders, and both have proved unwilling or unable to ‘protect’ our class whatever side of the divide.
The ruthless potential to unleash violence against us everywhere is another defining element of the Capitalist State, the local franchise of global superpower rivalry and conflict.
Israel and Hamas are far from the only combatants. Despite escalating, though restrained so far, assaults by Iranian proxy Hezbollah in Lebanon, Iran may not be ready yet to squander its deterrent force there against an Israeli attack on their nuclear program.
This assumes that Israel does not want to provoke the opportunity while it appears to have such unconditional Western support. The US is already exchanging fire in Syria and Iraq. Everywhere our class is in jeopardy with nothing to gain and everything to lose.
We are experiencing this conflict not just virtually, but within our own class here and now. The tribal politics of division are being stirred to divert us from our own interests as workers and producers.
We do not want to fight and die in their wars for their profits and their power. We do not want to pay for it through their imposed austerity and war profiteering.
Their interests and ours are not the same. Their interest is imperialist war, ours is Class War, our only weapon against their brutal exploitation, division and slaughter!
In Ukraine and Russia, in Gaza and Israel, in the US and Iran, our class has no nation! On the home front and internationally: No War But The Class War!
This is the initial statement of NWBCW Tyne & Wear, in which the ACN is involved.
RESIST THE GLOBAL MARCH TO SLAUGHTER
Across the world working class people are being slaughtered, from endless battles in the Ukraine, to mass murder in Israel, to ethnic cleansing in Gaza. The USA and EU are making one military bloc, and China, Russia and Iran are moving to make another. As the working class becomes increasingly impoverished and many of us can now barely afford to eat or heat our homes – and as environmental disaster approaches ever-closer on the horizon – the future looks bleak.
The answer cannot be support for cross-class alliances in the mistaken belief that national liberation equals self-determination and a progressive step forward. Capitalism has been in a continuing deep crisis for decades now, and as capitalists find it harder and harder to make profits, they are left with fewer options to kickstart a new cycle of boom and bust. The last time this happened, the Depression of the 1930s, led to the Second World War. What is happening now in Ukraine and Gaza is what capitalism has in store for all of us unless we can stop it.
The best way to halt capitalism’s drive to war internationally is for workers to break the “social peace” at home. That is why we have come together to say No War But the Class War. We must use whatever means are available to us where we possess the greatest strength – at work and in our communities. From simple day-to-day acts – such as sharing information to challenge the dominant narrative – to strikes, occupations and refusals to serve in the military. The working class’s two main weapons are class consciousness and our ability to organize on a mass scale. We cannot allow ourselves to be pitted against each other to our loss and for the benefit of rulers and the rich.
Working class people are already saying no: in July, thousands of ordinary Palestinians were protesting Hamas and its corruption in Gaza, just as ordinary Israelis have been refusing the call up to serve in the IDF. Groups in Ukraine and in Russia have been documenting the refusals to fight from working class conscripts on both sides of the conflict. There are people and groups saying No War But the Class War all over the world including Liverpool, Glasgow, Paris, Rome, Turkey, South Korea, Australia, the US and Canada.
As the vast majority in society, we have it in our power to create a new world without states, without the profit system, where we can be warm, feel valued and be healthy, where we can control our own lives.
Get in touch: NWBCWTyneandWear@proton.me twitter.com/NWBCWTyne_Wear
Turn the guns they gave you away from each other and on those who command you to kill your fellow workers for THEIR ambition and THEIR profit!
This, the long-held dream of internationalist resistance against capitalist war, is as urgent now as ever before. Refuse the recurring and relentless bloodletting of our class who own nothing but our labour and gain nothing from our slaughter!
Such a dream is no less fantastical than the idea that this war will bring peace! Blood does not wash blood and dying does not bring back the dead.
The history is so old that it no longer informs the present. Whatever date it starts from, there is always the day before it. Only our experience of what the exploitation of our class means and the price we pay for that ‘privilege’ must inform us now.
Every platitude pushed out by the West on the Gaza war is the opposite of what they say about the war in Ukraine. Destruction and genocide are no longer ‘war crimes’ but legitimised self defence. The defence of who by whom?
The obscenity of the hypocrisy of Hamas and the Israeli State and their respective power bloc backers, hidden behind their opportunism, is exposed in their words.
On the 19th October the Hamas (‘Zeal’) leader, Khaled Mashaal, said in an interview with the Saudi ‘Al-Arabiya’ network: “We know very well the consequences of our operation on October 7th.”, adding “No nation is liberated without sacrifices.”
When asked how many Palestinian lives Hamas was prepared to sacrifice to meet its aims, he referred to the loss of 30,000,000 Russians to defeat Germany in the Second World War. That would be more than twice the number of the world’s Palestinian diaspora.
In March 2019, Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, told his ruling political party, Likud (‘the Consolidation): “Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas … This is part of our strategy – to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank.”
Hamas has the blood of Israelis and Palestinians on its hands; Israel has the blood of Palestinians and Israelis on its hands. These bloody hands, so intertwined for decades, are the ones handing you the guns!
The death of 1500 Israelis is a tragedy, the mounting death toll of 5,000 Palestinians is increasingly treated as a statistic. The State in Power, Israel, and the ‘State in waiting’, Hamas, are equal in their indifference to our suffering and the outcomes.
In this war, as in Ukraine and Russia, our class are the fish in the barrel being killed whatever direction we swim in. The dead are our dead, the gain is theirs!
As our losses mount, other exploiters are entering the fray as Hezbollah, Iran and even Iraq are joining or being threatened by one side or the other. As if Lebanese, Iranian and Iraqi workers have not suffered enough.
Workers have no oil, have not ports, have no geo-strategic assets – we just build them and die for them. We ultimately have the power to refuse dying and rebuild again, for our own needs not theirs.
All war is against our class whichever side of a fence or border we are on. To refuse to fight and die in a war for power, profit and greed is not the dream of our class, but an historical necessity!
Every front is the Class War front. Class war solidarity is our only hope to survive! ‘No War but the Class War’ is not an appeal but a manifesto!
On 7 October, southern Israel was invaded by Hamas forces in an astounding, and largely unexpected, coordinated attack with militants breaking through the Gaza border, whilst air strikes reached as far as Tel Aviv in central Israel. For many Gazans, this was their first time outside their open-air prison, tearing down border fences, and the Israeli military’s first time on the back foot in 50 years to the day since the Yom Kippur War. From a Palestinian liberationist perspective, this looked like triumph. But over a thousand civilians were indiscriminately massacred throughout the day. One Kibbutz lost 10% of its population. Reportedly, nearly 200 Israelis were found at the site of a now-famous desert rave. Pictures were shared of a family of four all dead, and others found out their loved ones were dead from news footage. Around 150 estimated Israelis, soldiers and civilians, are being held hostage in Gaza as Hamas demand Palestinian prisoners freed in exchange for the hostages. Many pro-Palestinians have leaped to defend the massacre and consider ordinary Israelis to be settler-colonialists, including children, descendants of refugees, and even anti-occupation activists. Even if this were somehow true, the deaths of Bedouin, Nepalese students and Thai migrant workers make it hard to believe in justified murders. Before the end of the day, Iran and Hezbollah had made clear their support for Hamas and rival Palestinian Islamist faction Islamic Jihad.
The Israeli state wasted no time in calling a war a war. The security failure had left Israel’s leading politicians and military officials embarrassed. The success of Netanyahu, the Likud party, and the right-wing generally relied on a confidence in national security. The fault popularly attributed to the ever-depleting capitalist left in Israel was not economic mismanagement, but a willingness to secede land at the risk of security at borders. In one morning alone, Hamas had debunked the myth for the Israeli public that they were safe with Netanyahu in charge. Netanyahu and his ministers predictably ramped up the nationalism, and made clear that Palestinians should expect vengeance, and that Hamas were to be completely eliminated. Tens of thousands of reservists were drafted into the army as the language of politicians stopped just about short on calls for genocide.
As landed fighting continued around the border towns, Israel unleashed its harshest violence through air strikes on the Gaza Strip, striking hospitals and refugee camps, wiping out a family of 19, and all generations of 45 families, and almost razing an entire town. A blockade was put in place denying water, electricity, food and fuel, an act since condemned by the UN. The densely populated Gaza Strip allows for little movement or evacuation for ordinary citizens and after an Israeli air strike had destroyed the Rafah border crossing with Egypt, Gaza is now under total siege. The thorough displacement of the Palestinian people continues as Israeli authorities ordered 1.1 million in the north of Gaza to move south in what is already a tightly-controlled ghetto. Even the UN have called for this demand to be rescinded. Casualties in Gaza are now approximately double those in Israel and the death toll of Palestinians grows larger and larger as Israel’s military infrastructure dwarfs that of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, despite Qatari and Iranian financing. Though ethnic cleansing has long been an accurate description of Israeli attacks on the Palestinians, the scale of this war, and the reports of white phosphorus being used, are unapologetically genocidal. Rocket fire escalates on the Lebanese border between Hezbollah and Israel. The now-normal bouts of violence from far-right and religious fundamentalist Israelis in the West Bank have become intensified by increasing access to guns as the war spreads.
As the bloodshed accumulates, the stories that carry the highest tragedy are those of working-class people, Israelis and Palestinians. Political and military leaders make snap decisions that cost thousands of lives just to cling onto electoral popularity. Until the outbreak of war, the biggest movement in Israel has been the persistent mass demonstrations against Netanyahu’s government, in particular his self-serving and totalitarian attempt to weaken the judicial process. His campaign and support has relied centrally on national security issues so the initial Hamas massacre and subsequent hostage situation has severely undermined this claim. A disproportionate amount of military bases are focused on the West Bank, allowing the religious far-right to provoke and attack Palestinians, and protect them from any violent response. In the South, Hamas military prowess was underestimated, with urban working-classes, immigrant communities, and kibbutzniks left in the line of fire. Comparisons have been drawn with the 1973 Yom Kippur War which ended Golda Meir’s career in office. Netanyahu however has already spent years becoming more and more accommodating towards the far-right. Annexation of the West Bank, Trump’s decision to move the US embassy to the contested East Jerusalem, the passing of the Basic Law, softness on settler violence all have solidified Israel’s shift even further to the right. There are now high-ranking ex-Kahanist cabinet ministers, a movement so extreme that it’s still officially deemed terrorist by both Israel and the US. So far, nationalism is prevailing in full force and calls for the annihilation of Gaza are getting louder, at least under the guise of eradicating Hamas. In Tel Aviv however, families of hostages and casualties have been protesting and holding vigils outside the Defence Ministry. These are patriotic protests and neither anti-war, anti-occupation, nor economic in their demands, but they hold Netanyahu accountable for military failure, not doing enough to rescue hostages, and his totalitarianism more generally.
Most criminal is Netanyahu’s own recent (cynical) assistance to Hamas. The semi-state represented by the Palestinian Authority functions primarily in the West Bank and is not recognised by Hamas who control the Gaza Strip. The Palestinian Authority is represented by Fatah and the PLO. Officially a peace treaty exists between Israel and the PLO, and the PLO in turn favours a two-state solution and opposes terrorism whereas Hamas reject a two-state solution and the existence of Israel and favour armed struggle. The Palestinian Authority is largely secular and carries a political face while Hamas are extremist Islamists. In amongst the bizarre developments of imperialism, Netanyahu realised that Hamas could be useful; the moderate Palestinian Authority, headed by Mahmoud Abbas, were more likely to enter into political negotiations with the West and campaign for the slightly more realistic two-state solution, promised in the 1993 Oslo Accords. For as long as Hamas condone violence, Islamism and a one-state solution, they have little chance of getting Western support, and their largely ineffective rocket attacks in the South were manageable for the IDF. Netanyahu’s government has granted an increasingly growing number of work permits to Gazan labourers to appease Gazans and indirectly facilitate more money into Gaza. Blind eyes have been turned to Qatari cash entering Gaza in the millions. Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s extremist far-right Finance Minister, put it in so many words: “The Palestinian Authority is a burden, Hamas is an asset […] No-one will let it put forth a resolution at the UN Security Council.” Only three decades ago, the two-state solution was a moderate plan advocated by Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin (before his assassination by a far-right extremist). Now, the Israeli state would rather ally with those who want Israel’s total destruction than risk political negotiations for a two-state solution.
For Hamas, this attack is an attempt to assert itself as the representative of the Palestinian people. Fatah maintain their peaceful face against increasing destruction in the West Bank, and resistance goes little further than demonstrations, skirmishes and individual attacks. Through this major attack, Hamas has presented itself as a force of resistance, in military strategy and funding as well as initiative. In July of this year, thousands took to the streets across Gaza in economic protests against Hamas. With Hamas taxing Qatari donations to impoverished Gazans, it’s no surprise that Palestinian workers were burning Hamas flags. On other occasions, Hamas have been more tactical in successfully laying the blame for economic unrest at Israel’s door and turning the protests towards Israeli soldiers at the border. The other major contender for power in Gaza is Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which is more extreme and violent even than Hamas. The initial invasion may have garnered Hamas its renewed and reasserted popularity but it’s not hard to imagine that some Palestinians now facing Israel’s horrendous onslaught will be wondering whether the 1,400+ Israeli casualties are worth the new situation.
The Wider Imperialist Web
Under capitalism, no war is isolated and it doesn’t take long before ancient ethnic, national and religious conflicts are hijacked by major powers in an imperialist scramble. The USA and, for the most part, the EU wasted no time in announcing support for Israel, while Iran and Hezbollah did the same for Hamas. Though Israel’s vengeance in Gaza is drawing humanitarian condemnations comparable to Russia’s actions in Ukraine, a war between Israel and Palestine threatens a proxy war between Iran and the USA. It’s likely that imperialist economic treaties played a part in the attack in the first place. In the Abraham Accords of 2020 Israel signed Normalisation Treaties with UAE, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan, mostly to benefit economic trade links. This was a step closer towards the West for those Arab states but has intensified rivalries elsewhere. Morocco and Algeria, for example, severed ties shortly after, committing to their respective imperialist blocs. Over the course of the year, a Normalisation Treaty between Israel and Saudi Arabia has looked more and more likely, again cementing Saudi Arabia’s alliance with the West but affronting Islamists as their main place of pilgrimage is in Saudi Arabia. As war continues between Russia and Ukraine, and conflicts escalate between Armenia and Azerbaijan, Turkey and Kurdistan, China and Taiwan, and Serbia and Kosovo/Albania, the major Imperialist powers adopt smaller states to exert their influence across the world for military strategy and economic resources. The lines are not always clear-cut. It remains to be seen how Russia and China will respond to this new war given their strong economic ties with Israel and their growing closeness with Iran. Turkey have condemned the forced displacement of Palestinians with a moderate line seeking peace and mourning casualties on both sides, attempting to appease for the time being its uneasy alliance with both Israel and Hamas. States may politely call for peace but the logic of imperialism dictates generalised war is on the horizon. Religion and ideology may be the language of conflict but in reality, they play little part in the imperialist divisions of the world; the current violent competition is more to do with the economic crisis of the global capitalist system.
For Zionists, the security of Israeli Jews is threatened by Palestinian nationalism and the state and military must continue to defend its people. For us, it is axiomatic that security is not provided by the capitalist state. That state exists to protect the wealth of its ruling class. The military sends workers to die and be tortured for a pittance in the name of the homeland while the rulers sit around working out economic foreign treaties and, motivated by power-greed, duplicitously assisting the homeland’s very enemy. Nor is a healthy and safe life afforded by protecting one nationality and bullying another; such a policy only exacerbates a cycle of war. Rami Levi, a major Israeli supermarket chain, has been recruiting ‘volunteers’ as retail assistants to assist in the war effort as reservists leave for military duty and Israelis stock up for emergency. Working for a profitable supermarket chain is unpaid labour yet amid the nationalism, it somehow becomes commendable. The Israeli proletariat will continue to be exploited even as they cheer on soldiers. As already evident with Rami Levi, the work will become harder as staff are lost to reserve duty, evacuation, or death, and wages will decrease as the government puts all its money towards war. Any strikes or economic protests will be immediately crushed under the weight of betraying the national cause. The enemy of the Israeli worker is not the Palestinian worker but the Israeli ruling-class.
Workers Have No Country
For Palestinian nationalists, quoting Franz Fanon, decolonization is necessarily violent. If Palestinians are to achieve an end to occupation and an independent state, it must come at the cost of Israeli lives. Unlike the Zionists, this is the most popular stance within the UK’s capitalist Left. Decolonization is not a communist demand. In the first place, colonialism is a specific economic organisational form that does not apply to Israel. Israel is expansionist and uses military occupation and violence to destroy Palestinian homes and replace them with Israeli homes — this does not constitute an attempt at growing an empire. Moreover, of anti-colonial struggles in Algeria, South Africa, China, or indeed Israel, to name a few, not one has resulted in a proletarian revolution but merely new reactionary forces exploiting workers and being drawn into imperialist camps. Ben Bella, the first President of Algeria after fighting for its national liberation, later reflected that national liberation movements “have all failed. As long as we have not broken the world capitalist order, we remain exploited by the mercantile relations of production.”(1) Even if a Palestinian state somehow came into being, whether it were to become an Islamist state, a secular social-democracy, or a Stalinist regime, it would bring Palestinian workers no closer to communist revolution. Only a stronger Palestinian bourgeoisie would emerge, exploiting its own and oppressing others. Nationalist movements dictate that workers put aside class struggle and join with their bosses to fight for the nation. That has never been a prerequisite of communism. That so-called socialists gather to wave a national flag and gush over Islamist massacres that have detracted from recent anti-Hamas economic protests is shameful.
As for the few remaining liberals that call for a two-state solution, their committed optimism towards peace under capitalism is naive. Two states are no better than one as two sets of capitalist exploiters are no better than one. The fall of Apartheid did not end the white South African capitalists but only added a black South African bourgeoisie that could continue the exploitation of workers while presenting as equal representation. A two-state solution multiples the standing armies, the imperialist contestation, and ultimately bloodshed.
Our position is, and has always been, internationalism with no exceptions. No exceptions, not out of abstract idealism but out of a consistent materialist opposition to capitalism and its imperialist survival strategies. Proletarian revolution can only be internationalist and this requires all workers in solidarity against all ruling-classes as the enemy. In capitalism’s imperialist epoch no true internationalist could suspend their class struggle to fight alongside their ruling-classes, their inherent enemy in the division of labour, to establish their ‘own’ new nation in which they can once again be robbed, but now by their own ruling-class and not another. Even Lenin’s advocacy for self-determination, with which we part from Lenin, was a tactical policy, based on the belief that national independence was a necessary step towards an independent working class movement in the colonies. As we always have, we call on Israeli and Palestinian workers to turn their guns away from each other and towards their real enemies: the ruling-class. Many accuse this of being a pipe-dream and it’s true that in the current situation, nationalism prevails on both sides. Our politics are consistent rather than opportunistic and we affirm the right choice for revolutionary workers rather than uselessly hijack popular movements until we are absorbed by them. We translate and spread our literature rather than re-appropriate national liberation for our own cause and give up on the class struggle. Besides, it is not such a pipe-dream. Mass demonstrations against Netanyahu have lasted throughout the year and not dwindled in number. These were patriotic liberals flying their own flag, the same flag waved by ultranationalists and the same flag that now adorns coffins. Nonetheless, there is internal discontent within Israeli society. Mass demonstrations against Hamas made clear their opposition to Hamas’ control and economic exploitation. These too included nationalists and nonetheless, these too prove discontent within Palestinian society. Workers oppose their political leaders. That is not a pipe-dream but reality.
We are somehow rare voices in our genuine internationalism but we follow in a revolutionary tradition. Let us hear from Pyatakov, Bosch and Bukharin, writing as early as 1915.(2)
It is therefore impossible to struggle against the enslavement of nations other than through a struggle against imperialism. Ergo a struggle against imperialism; ergo a struggle against finance capital; ergo a struggle against capitalism in general. To turn aside from this path in any way and advance “partial” tasks of the “liberation of nations” within the limits of capitalist society diverts proletarian forces from the true solution of the problem and unites them with the forces of the bourgeoisie of the corresponding national groups. … Therefore it follows that in no case and under no circumstances do we support the government of a great power that represses the insurrection or rebellion of an oppressed nation. At the same time, we do not mobilize proletarian forces under the slogan of “the right of nations to self-determination.” Our task in this case is to mobilize the forces of the proletariat of both nations (jointly with others) under the slogan of civil, class war for socialism and to propagandize against mobilization of forces under the slogan of “the right of nations to self-determination.
Shraga Communist Workers’ Organisation 17 October 2023
(2) From the theses written in November 1915 and submitted to the editors of Sotsial-Demokrat, the central organ of the RSDLP. To our knowledge, the theses were never actually published in the 1915 Kommunist. libcom.org
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