Tag: Gaza

Imperialism, refugees, racism and Israel’s genocide

By Naciye Suman

This article is being written on the 23rd August, which coincides with the International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its Abolition. It was on the 23rd August 1791, that enslaved people on the island of Saint Domingue (modern-day Haiti and the Dominican Republic) rose up against French colonial rule. The uprising played a crucial role in the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade. A slave trade that ravaged the continent of Africa with around 15 million Africans of their sons and daughters enslaved and shipped across the Atlantic to the colonised ‘new world’. Around 2 million died in the middle passage, finding themselves thrown overboard to feed fish. Between 1640 and 1807, British ships transported about 3.4 million Africans across the Atlantic to create wealth for British capitalists.

Toussaint Louverture, leaader of the Haitian Revoluton and Great Slave Revolt of 1791

Capitalism and its evil twin imperialism is responsible for war, oppression, and environmental destruction on a huge scale, holding the world to ransom and the potential collapse of the biosphere. European nations and their bastard children, the Anglo-Saxon colonies of the US, Canada, and Australia preach their advanced civilised enlightened state with claims of moral superiority, their shouts of “liberty, equality, and fraternity” as they act as the world’s police forces. In reality their colonisation and slavery have not ended but taken on a new respectful phase in oppressing the Global South with ‘trade and funding deals’, allowing corporate exploitation of the extraction of resources, leaving a wake of pollution and poverty behind, and when that fails should the natives resist, regime change, or the raining down of bombs.

Nothing epitomises this more of the value of white corporate individuals over their less worthy poor brown counterparts than the recent sinking of the luxury super yacht, Bayesian, when it capsized off the coast of Sicily in the Mediterranean. The Morgan Stanley International chair, Jonathan Bloomer, and UK tech entrepreneur, Mike Lynch, were among six people unaccounted for, with wall-to-wall coverage in the media and a well organised search and rescue attempt provided. Contrast this with around the deaths of 25,000 refugees trying to cross the Mediterranean to safety. The reality is that European lives matter, others less so. Not all lives are equal. Europe is more than willing to accept this as it pays Turkey to act as its gatekeeper. Where is the outcry in the press or on the TV channels? Where is the public outcry? Where are the protests? The only guaranteed response from governments is to administer further restrictions on those seeking asylum – even making it a criminal offence to assist refugees, even saving lives at sea, which is a legal obligation under international law.

The recent riots in Britain were attributed to an explosion of racism directed towards refugees and migrants. Responsibility for this is due to the demonisation of Muslims, refugees, and migrants, carried out by successive governments. As the embers from the flames of unrest still smoulder, instead of reflection Starmer’s response has been to act tough on asylum, the victims themselves of the recent riots. His attack dog, the Home Secretary Yvette Cooper, has just announced a new ‘major surge’ in deportations of asylum seekers with the re-opening of two more detention centres and a promise to achieve the highest rate of removals since 2018. Detention centres are another name for prisons to place those already fleeing persecution, all designed to deter those seeking asylum. Being held in these places impacts on an individual’s mental health, sometimes leading to suicide.  The UK has one of the biggest detention centres in Europe, near Heathrow airport. It is also the only European country without a maximum limit on the length of time an individual can be detained. Research has shown that asylum seekers are five times more likely to have mental health needs than the general population with 61% experiencing severe mental distress.

So much for our civilised nature and tolerant nation. But this should come as no surprise, Labour has declared its neoliberal intent and drawn its line in the sand. Its removal of the winter fuel allowance for over 10 million pensioners, while at the same time allowing energy companies who are making record breaking profits to raise energy prices by 10% later this year shows the utter contempt it has for its own citizens. Why should it care about anyone else? This is how capitalism views human beings, nothing more than a commodity whose labour is to be exploited while also being encouraged to consume and feed the system. When that productive cycle comes to an end, the parasitic nature of the capitalist system is to spit the person out onto the scrapheap to fend for themselves.

The othering and demonisation of refugees, migrants, and especially Muslims, is designed to distract attention from domestic policies but it also importantly feeds into Britain’s war narrative as well as. They are entwined. A clear example of this is how white refugees from Ukraine were immediately given sanctuary against the racist back drop of Russophobia and how these refugees were ‘just like us’, Europeans with descriptions of ‘blond hair and blue eyes’. This allowed the clamour for war against Russia in Ukraine. Contrast that with the Palestinians now facing slaughter with an ongoing genocide sanctioned by Washington, London, Paris, and Berlin. Where are the safe routes for brown Muslims trapped in Gaza being bombed with our bombs? Why? Because they are our bombs raining down. Where is the outrage against this other than through the sanitised demonstrations taking place on the streets in London. Demonstrations organised by Stop the War and the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign with the full co-operation with the institutionally racist Metropolitan Police to ensure that it doesn’t impact upon anyone. Permission granted by the authorities to object against our imperialist war with set times and set routes on set dates, anything outside of this is open to arrest.

Palestine Solidarity march in London agasint Gaza genocide, April 2024

The truth is that now not only is colonisation taking place elsewhere but that we ourselves are also being colonised. As individuals we are being stripped of our humanity, we are allowing ourselves to be conditioned to accept anything and everything being put before us as ‘truth’. We allow ourselves to yield, to become hypnotised, and act robotically to seamlessly slide into the capitalist system, to become validated by being told of our productiveness as if there is no other system to satisfy our needs. In this we have become desensitised to the suffering of others or to the complete destruction of our environment, which not only sustains us but also alongside all other life on this planet. We conveniently divert our gaze from uncomfortable truths; we see the footage coming out of Gaza of children torn limb from limb, mothers wailing that their children are buried underneath collapsed buildings. But these atrocities do nothing to wake us from our slumber. Anyone not having their conscience pricked and feeling anything but rage is just as complicit as those that drop the bombs killing children. We are complicit with our tax dollars going towards this murder. War and environmental destruction are signs that the system is broken, a system that places profit over people with profit central to imperialist greed. We as individuals are broken.

Israel’s ongoing destruction of the Palestinian population did not start on October the 7th 2023, it started in 1947-48 and has been ongoing in our name ever since. Israel is nothing but a settler colonial state, while not in the classic sense of having a mother country, it has several mother countries; those predominately being Europe and the US, particularly the former who not only saw a way out of their ‘Jewish problem’ but through collective guilt at their own appalling history of ‘Jewish hate’. Those that were going to pay for European antisemitism and the Holocaust were to be the brown Palestinians. It didn’t matter, it created opportunities, namely a European state planted right in the middle of a ‘barbaric Muslim’ Middle East, providing the colonisers and their backers a strategic foothold and undue influence in an area in abundance with black gold.

October 7th and ‘Operation al-Aqsa Flood’ is described as another Jewish Holocaust to justify the massacre of Gaza. It plays on the European psyche and how Europe facilitated the Nazis leading to the murder of 6 million Jews. It uses the memory of those massacred to facilitate its own massacre. Those colonised have had to face atrocity after atrocity directed towards them in the name of Jewish supremacy for decades. The massacres of civilians, the incarceration of adults and children without charge or trial, often with torture, the deliberate targeting of children by snipers, and expulsion from and the demolition of homes, are everyday occurrences for Palestinians. The brutality meted out towards the Palestinians from the pariah Zionist state’s occupation forces and its backers in the US and Europe have stripped the Palestinians of their humanity. Trying to reason with colonists on a humane political level has never worked, it just returns with more violence from an occupier that sees it as a sign of weakness. Stripped naked with constant violence the oppressed eventually come to a realisation of their own power and what it is to be human by uprising. This is what happened on October 7th. They have nothing left but to rise faced with almost certain death and the death of their children.

How dare these oppressor nations talk of being civilised when using bombs dropped from advanced jets to silence the oppressed, or talk of the crime of rape when Palestinian detainees are being filmed by their captors as they are raped, or talk of children being beheaded when decapitated babies are being brought out from underneath rubble as occupation forces blow up buildings and laugh about their exploits on social media. All this under the watchful eye of the West with full material and political support. The Palestinians and Muslims in general have been reduced to zoological terms, described as ‘animals’ or ‘swarm’, even ‘cockroaches’ by those justifying this murder. How do we expect those being oppressed to find themselves and react? The only option open is to meet violent colonisation with violent resistance. Those that advocate non-violence are just as bad as those that avert their gaze. There is no option for non-violence, it has been removed as any option by their captors. The truth is that as Israel looks into the mirror it sees its own reflection. The occupation has made this resistance and its turn towards violence.  When their colonial masters elevate violence as being necessary to keep order, provide safety, or economic and national stability, then it’s obvious that the Palestinians will view the same to be necessary.

For too long this oppression has been camouflaged with talk of ‘Jewish safety’ and a ‘Jewish home’, terrorism, and a two-state solution. Many on the left have facilitated this crime by raising similar concerns while ignoring a simple fact, a brutal planted coloniser and those being colonised and removed from their land. These same leftists have become nothing but mouthpieces for imperialism. Why should a ‘diaspora’ who have had no connection to a land for 2,000 years, except through religious scripture, have precedence over an indigenous population who have land titles and ties to the land running through generations? Why do modern-day Jews have a manufactured ‘right of return’ when those being dispossessed do not? How can Jews that now identify with their state of Israel claim to be unsafe when safe with dual nationality in nations that manufacture an antisemitism crisis to create a hierarchy of racism to afford privilege? How can one right of ‘self-determination’ and removal from ‘oppression’ be granted while removing others from theirs. This is the hypocrisy of the West.

Mass grave of genocide victims in Gaza

The reality is that the conditions on the ground in Palestine with Gaza destroyed and the Gazan population with nowhere to go, alongside with the annexation of east Jerusalem and the West Bank, it no longer allows for a viable Palestinian state alongside their murderous neighbour. Particularly one that has no intention of allowing it. The only option is a one-state solution. This presents problems for the coloniser, it undermines the demographic superiority of their state. Ultimately, it is for those that are occupied to decide what this one state looks like, not the occupiers. Where has history allowed the occupier to decide the terms of independence of the occupied and what sort of anti-imperialists are we should we argue against this? In the meantime, the Palestinians get to decide what their resistance looks like and what form it takes to shake off their chains. The West have no authority to moralise given their own bankruptcy.

This conflict and the bravery and resilience of the Palestinians, alongside the slide into fascism of the Israeli state will be Israel’s own undoing. It is eating itself from within as it becomes clear that oppression of the indigenous population is not leading towards ‘Jewish safety’ or solving its Palestinian problem. The drive religiously rightwards in Israel is creating political divisions, domestic unrest on the streets, increasing international ostracization, and its economic destruction. Only its Western backers are keeping Israel afloat, a West that that requires its own culture wars targeting refugees and Muslims as part of the wider ‘clash of civilisations’ pantomime to enable support for genocide.

It was no coincidence that Netanyahu said in address to the US Congress “We meet today at a crossroads of history. Our world is in upheaval. In the Middle East, Iran’s axis of terror confronts America, Israel and our Arab friends. This is not a clash of civilizations. It’s a clash between barbarism and civilization. It’s a clash between those who glorify death and those who sanctify life. For the forces of civilization to triumph, America and Israel must stand together. Because when we stand together, something very simple happens. We win. They lose.” This is a call for a wider imperialist war in the region, divide the Muslim world, and justify more aid to its chronically and psychologically ill colonial partner. They talk of barbarism. This is the language of racism. Victory to the resistance and the Palestinian struggle.

Starmer’s pro-Zionist Government – Genocide and Pogroms go hand-in-hand

This is the text of the presentation today at our forum on August’s Attempted Fascist Pogrom, and the Left’s Successful Resistance.

The presentation and extensive discussion can also be listened to as a podcast here.

Genocidaire Starmer (above) endorsed  Israeli blockade of Gaza for food, water and fuel. (below) Palestinian child dying of starvation in Gaza.
 

Even from afar, it was obvious that the recent wave of anti-immigrant race-riots, which were in fact an attempted nationwide pogrom, was not beaten-back by Starmer and his pro-Zionist, genocide-supporting/genocide-denying government. The problem is that however many police they sent out to supposedly ‘deal with’ those who were trying to burn down Mosques in early August, they were bound to be ineffective. Why? Because the government fundamentally agreed with the rioters. As David Miller has pointed out, the leading figures who incited the riots are in effect Israeli agents. Particularly Yaxley-Lennon, the most prominent British fascist, whose political projects have been funded by Israel, through various covert channels for many years, and who has been proudly photographed with the Israeli army, riding on tanks, etc. The motive for the attacks on Muslims is retribution and intimidation of a community that has been pivotal in building the mass movement in solidarity with the victims of Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

However much the government tries to evade the point, Starmer clearly supported the genocidal actions of Israel when in an interview with Nick Ferrari of LBC on 11th October 2023, he justified Yoav Gallant’s stated intention to deprive Gaza’s “human animals” (Gallant’s words) of food, water and power. That was Starmer’s real position. Everything he says now is evasion dictated by fear of political discredit or even possible prosecution for providing political support for the crime of genocide that the International Court of Justice, considered ‘plausible’ in January. The atrocities since make it a lot more than merely ‘plausible’. As he stood to be Labour leader in 2020, Starmer made a point of stating that he supported Zionism “without qualification”. And the Labour Zionists who funded him abhor the mass movement in solidarity with Palestine just as much as the far-right thugs like Yaxley do. Though they prefer state repression, Prevent and lies about ‘anti-Semitism’ to burning down Mosques. Not a good look.  

And there is the smear campaign against the grouping of independent Muslim left-wing MPs who defeated New Labour in the General Election, bizarrely accusing them of ‘intimidation’ when in fact they clearly won the popular vote. The implication being that the population don’t have the right to vote out Zionist thugs and liars. That is a clear coincidence of interest between the Starmer government and the Zio-fascists.

Another manifestation of the Starmer regime’s affinity with the far right is its support for Maidan Ukraine, which is basically run by Nazis for the benefit of US imperialism. It also has a genocidal policy, of seeking to eliminate the Russian-speaking population of Donbass, the South-Eastern part of Ukraine, and the overwhelmingly Russian population of Crimea. The evidence of Nazi domination in Ukraine is overwhelming. Even the Jewish president of Ukraine, Zelensky, who was groomed by US imperialism precisely to try to camouflage the Nazi domination of Ukraine, was filmed leading a standing ovation in the Canadian parliament for a 98-year old veteran of Hitler’s SS. Zelensky is a Zionist: part of an increasingly common phenomena of Zionist Jews willing to forgive the Nazi holocaust of Jews as long as Nazis direct their genocidal proclivities against their enemies today – Arabs, Muslims and Russians. Support for Nazi Ukraine and its supposed fight for ‘freedom’ against the Russian population native to its own country – it literally is the case that they want rid of that ‘unwanted’ population – is a point of honour for Starmer and New Labour.

Not that the Starmerites won’t throw a certain number of fascist lumpens into jail for fighting the cops. Not that some of them won’t get severe sentences and lose a lot. That’s a given. That’s what happens to overtly criminal elements who brazenly defy the police when they involve themselves in behaviour that the ruling class finds inconvenient. They get more than just a slap on the wrist. A certain number will get 10-year sentences for riot. Quite a few already have. The rise of this racist lumpenism is a product of neoliberalism, deindustrialisation and the shrinkage of the working class resulting from that. New Labour offers no relief from that economic suffering, no strategy, just more of the same. The bourgeois media works overtime to incite such lumpen layers against ‘foreigners’ to make sure they don’t revolt against capitalism itself.

This government shares many of the hatreds and bigotries of the rioters. They too want to punish refugees and migrants. They too think that Muslims should be forced to shut up about the oppression and persecution they are suffering from so often, in Britain, today. In particular, the government want to silence blacks, Muslims, and other oppressed groups who are inclined to show solidarity with the Palestinians and have been marching for 10 months against the brutal Zionist mass murder of the people of Gaza. Along with the left, who they have wilfully driven out of the Labour Party by the hundreds of thousands to prove their ‘fitness to rule’ to the billionaire capitalist class and the Zionists. In that, they agree with the likes of Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, with the provocateur Andrew Tate, with Laurence Fox, with Trump and Farage, and all the other criminal far right elements who incited these racist riots.

On 29th July a terrible triple murder of three young girls in Southport, and wounding of several other small children, apparently by a deranged, British-born teenager, was extensively lied about on social media by this fascist scum and attributed to a completely fictional Muslim refugee.  Over the following week or more there were terrible attacks on migrants all over the country, mosques were attacked in attempted arson attacks. Hotels, reputed to be accommodating refugees, were also subject to arson attacks. Non-whites were physically attacked in the street by groups of racists. In Manchester a black man was challenged whether had a “problem” with “us English” – before being violently attacked. An Asian man was brutally attacked in Hartlepool simply for walking down a street that had been taken over by a mob of racist thugs. In Middlesborough, fascist ‘rioters’ set up ‘checkpoints’ on some streets to make sure that drivers were ‘white and English’ – with the threat of violence and even murder against anyone who is not. In many places these thugs fought pitched battles with the police, who in some situations were the only thing standing in the way of members of racial minorities being brutally attacked and even murdered.

 On 7th August there was a call to attack Mosques, hotels being used to house refugees, lawyers who defend migrants, and other targets related to Muslims and various migrant communities. Right across the country. A British version of Kristallnacht, the massive Nazi pogrom in 1938 that laid the basis for the Nazi holocaust. The likes of Yaxley and Farage would love such a pogrom in Britain. But it never happened. And it is no thanks to Starmer that it did not happen.

What stopped it was mass demonstrations across Britain organised at short notice by the anti-racist left. The SWP’s ‘Stand Up to Racism’ front was one major locus of this organisation, but far from the only one. The many left independent campaigns that fought so valiantly in the General Election, returning five independent MP’s, along with several more near misses where the vilest Zionist racists in New Labour were challenged and came close to defeat, also threw their mass base in into the effort. From Walthamstow in East London, to Brighton, to Liverpool, Sheffield, Manchester, Birmingham, Bristol, Newcastle and more, thousands, sometimes tens of thousands, turned out to demonstrate against the fascists, to defend the Muslim communities and in support of migrants. They massively outnumbered the miserable groups of neo-Nazis who turned out. In several places small groups of fascists were massively outnumbered by anti-fascist, anti-racist demonstrators. These thugs, who were previously in fights with the cops over their supposed ‘right’ to attack minorities, suddenly had to be rescued by the same cops from huge crowds of angry anti-fascists who would have made mincemeat out of them.

This was a major tactical defeat for the fascists. And neither the government, nor the police, had anything to do with it. In fact, Keir Starmer, our non-esteemed Prime Minister, attempted to ban Labour MP’s from taking part in anti-fascist demonstrations. One prominent black Labour MP who refused to abide by this and spoke publicly at an anti-fascist demonstration in Norwich, is Clive Lewis. Unlike in the case of the 7 MP’s who had the Labour whip removed for defying him over the two-child benefit cap, Starmer has not dared to do the same to him. Which mirrors what happened with Diane Abbott in the General Election, where Starmer was forced to reinstate the whip to her after attempting to purge her for the sacrilege of publicly doubting if Jews today suffer from systematic racist oppression, as is true for non-whites. Starmer fears taking on the black community at the same time as he is waging war against Muslims.

The forces of the state did not drive back the fascists, nor did the government. Stiff sentences for some of these far-right rioters are just a fig leaf to hide the government’s inaction and refusal to mobilise politically against the far right. Because the Starmer government agrees with the far right on so many things. That is why it ran in the General Election, and for the last few years, as a flag-shagging, Union Jack-laden party advertising its ‘patriotism’ in a manner strongly reminiscent of the way Donald Trump in the US wraps his campaigns with the bloody Stars and Stripes. This symbolises its adherence to the anti-migrant creed of the Tory and Reform Brexiters.

Prior to the 2019 General Election Starmer cynically manipulated the sentiments of many in the Labour Party – including most Corbynites – who opposed Brexit, not out of any faith in the capitalist-neoliberal bloc that the EU represents, but simply because of its anti-migrant thrust. He put forward a proposal for a second referendum with ‘remain’ on the ballot paper in 2019, and called for the reversal of Brexit, simply to sabotage Labour’s election prospects under Corbyn. It is worth noting that in 2017, Corbyn tactically accepted the narrow result of the Brexit referendum and campaigned for a soft Brexit maintaining the rights of EU workers, coming close to winning the General Election, robbing the Tories of their majority. Starmer’s policy destroyed that, by a brazen demand to overrule a previous popular vote before it had been implemented. It acted as rocket fuel to propel Boris Johnson into Downing Street. But the real motive was to destroy the leadership of Corbyn, because of its modest programme of social democratic reforms, which the boss-class will not tolerate, and his relatively weak, but real, criticism of Israel and support for the Palestinians.

Hence, we have a neoliberal, Zionist government that is carrying on with the austerity that characterised the Tories. It is determined to keep the two-child benefit cap which is a major driver of terrible child poverty. It has now removed the winter fuel payment for all but the poorest pensioners, those on pension credit. This while the supposed fuel-price cap goes up. This will cause thousands of pensioners to die because of the cold in the coming winter, even Labour MPs are warning. This is taking money straight out of the mouths of pensioners in the UK, who have the worst pensions in Europe, and sending the savings to fund Zionism and Ukrainian Nazism. Like Boris Johnson, they want the bodies of pensioners to ‘pile high’ so they can fund their far-right cohorts in Israel and Ukraine.

Expecting this anti-working class, racist government to do anything to deal with the threat of racist violence is a forlorn hope. Their ‘law and order’ will inevitably be used to attack those resisting far right violence. Like the scandalous arrest, and suspension from Labour, of black councillor Ricky Jones from Walthamstow, who called for the Nazi terrorists then rampaging and terrorising minorities across the country, to be executed by throat cutting. However crudely expressed, this is a completely understandable, emotional response to large-scale racist terrorism. The fear that this attempted pogrom caused among minority communities is enormous. Such responses are natural. It would be perfectly reasonable for a left-wing government, for instance, faced with such attempted mass pogroms, to resort to summary execution of the worst participants. The idea that minorities can rely on the police to defend them against such a systematic attack is a joke. Everyone knows that the police themselves persecute and abuse ethnic minorities, and often turn a blind eye to racist crimes. The list of scandals goes back many decades, in fact centuries. In fact, if the mass demonstrations that Ricky Jones participated in had not happened, the far right would have won.

This needs to be systematised, with the creation of independent working-class militias, centred on the trade unions, with the social muscle of organised workers behind them and their capacity to cripple the capitalist economy if the state tries to crush and outlaw such defence. The pro-capitalist trade union bureaucracy that blocks such things needs to be politically defeated. That is the way to defeat fascist terrorism. This would have the effect of breaking the bourgeois state’s monopoly of organised violence. Revolutionaries in Russia used these tactics to deal with the fascist Black Hundreds.

In tandem with independent working-class action against the fascists, we need working class resistance against austerity.  We need political strikes against the attacks on pensioners. We need a general strike against renewed austerity. This has the potential to unite the whole working class, as in the end, we are all destined to be pensioners. Uniting all such battles and struggles, we need to crystallise a real mass party of the working class. Such a party would not see its role as passively standing in elections, but rather using elections as a platform to garner and mobilise resistance in struggle.

Ultimately, we need to unite the many left-wing trends that have emerged from the Corbyn movement over the last several years in a project to create a broad, genuinely working-class party that can develop politically beyond social democracy, and fight for these things. This is the purpose of our involvement in the Socialist Labour Network, to try to create the conditions for such unity and political development. Our perspective should not be one of fighting for a reformist, parliamentary government that can fill in gaps while the Tories recover from their crisis. Let alone a Red Tory regime like Starmer’s. Our perspective should be to fight for a workers’ government, based on mass organisations of the working class.

Presentation and discussion: General Election: No Vote to Zionist New Labour – Support Left Independents/Anti-Zionists

(Top) Jeremy Corbyn,  Leanne Mohammad, (Below) George Galloway,  Andrew  Feinstein
 

The presentation and discussion at our forum this afternoon can also be heard here as a podcast

There is no major party standing in this General Election deserving of the support of class-conscious workers, socialists, anti-racists and fighters against oppression.

The Tories and Liberal Democrats are the open parties of the ruling class, speaking abstractly.

Being more concrete, we have all experienced the brutal austerity and increasingly decrepit corruption of this gang of looters of our social gains, public services, the Health service, the rivers polluted with raw sewage, the racist thuggery and sadism … I could go on.

First the Tory-Liberal coalition for 5 years, then the Tories alone. The rise of Jeremy Corbyn was a reaction from the workers movement to Tory-Lib Dem austerity attacks.

But today’s Labour Party was forged through a massive, reactionary driving out of the left that led the party from 2015-20 under Jeremy Corbyn.

This was the one period since the miners strike when millions of working-class people thought they had a chance of winning something back, through the election of a left-wing politician with a record of fighting for workers, of opposing privatisation and attacks on the poor, of standing up to bigoty and racism, and mobilisation against imperialist wars.

The current Labour leadership, as the whole country knows, buried that. They preferred the Tories. They engineered Johnson’s victory in 2019. Labour is standing in this election as a Tory second XI as they continue to stamp on the Labour left.

Some see the Greens as a potential repository of socialist possibilities. In Germany, the Greens are part of a coalition with the Social Democratic Party (SPD); they are deeply implicated in support for both Israel and Nazi Ukraine.

In this country sole Green MP Caroline Lucas, has been involved in ‘cross-party’ witchhunting critics of Zionism in academia, as shown in the case of David Miller.

They cannot be trusted, their environmentalism is bourgeois and depends on ‘Green’ capitalism, not socialist planning, which is the only thing that can solve the problem of human-induced climate change. We need a working-class alternative, not a petty bourgeois party that joins in with capitalist reaction.

But the main topic of this forum is Labour.

On October 8th Israeli ‘defence’ minister Yoav Gallant made his Hitlerian speech saying that the inhabitants of Gaza are “human animals” who should be allowed “no electricity, no food, no water, no gas”.

When Starmer was interviewed shortly after, he defended Israel’s “right” to carry out these genocidal measures.

This led to a major exodus of outraged members, particularly from Muslim working-class communities, and numerous defections of councillors.

The Labour leadership is dominated by genocidal Zionists.

The scam ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign against the left during the Corbyn period, was driven by the realisation by those forces that a genocide of the Palestinian people was in the offing, and politics had to be purged of sympathy for Palestinian rights.

But they have a huge problem now. This election takes place in the middle of that very genocide, that Starmer gave his support to

However much he tries to wriggle and evade now, he, and his supporters, are on the rack.

The Starmer leadership is a reversion to the politics of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown and their neoliberal New Labour governments, which followed in the footsteps of Thatcher and Major.

That government, like the Tories, demanded austerity to make the working class pay for the world financial crisis of the late noughties.

The neoliberal right, which is interpenetrated with the Zionists as a matter both of history and current political reality, was horrified by the near victory of Labour under Jeremy Corbyn in the 2017 election.

It appears that only the sabotage of the Labour right –the funnelling of campaign funds to safe Labour seats inhabited by neoliberals and Zionists – deprived Corbyn’s Labour of being the largest party.

The shocked expressions of ‘Labour Friends of Israel’ like Jess Phillips and Stephen Kinnock when May lost her majority, said it all.

They worked overtime to sabotage Corbyn’s leadership and bring Boris Johnson to power in the 2019 election. For the bourgeois/Zionist right-wing, Johnson was the lesser evil to Corbyn.

When the anti-Semitism scam was ineffective (as was shown in 2017), Starmer manipulated the issue of Brexit to sabotage Labour.

So, the idea that Starmer and his followers are somehow a lesser evil to the Tories today is at odds with reality. They have more in common with the Tories than they do with the labour movement.

This election gives the opportunity to the left to begin to clarify that and split this bourgeois workers party along class lines. We are seeing the small beginnings of that.

There is already a substantial layer of independent socialist councillors around the country, many of whom successfully defended their seats in the council elections on May 4th.

Starmer has the party’s internal life sewn up, dissent is ruthlessly punished, and internal party elections are shamelessly rigged.

Then in February Starmer colluded with Speaker Lindsay Hoyle, another “Labour Friend of Israel”.

Hoyle broke with an element of parliamentary procedure that has a democratic content. The rule being that on a party’s “Opposition Day”, that party is allowed to put a motion, and only the government is allowed to put amendments to it.

The purpose of this is to ensure that all opposition parties get to have their say; they have the right to have their motions voted on by the house, yes or no.

Hoyle allowed Labour to put an amendment to the SNP’s motion calling for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza.

Predictably, the Labour Party was able to outvote the SNP.  So, the SNP motion was amended to remove its most important demands, for a ceasefire and condemnation of “collective punishment” of Palestinian civilians in this genocide.

Which were never voted on in counter-position to the government,

Labour was afraid that if they were forced to vote on a ceasefire, they would split. But voting for something with ambiguous wording that was deliberately unclear, would not cause a problem.

So, the SNP’s right to a yes-no vote/confrontation against the government on Gaza was buried.

If the Labour Party had been forced to vote on the SNP motion versus the government, the whips would have demanded that Labour either vote with the government or abstain. Many would have rebelled.

This manoeuvre was to stop that happening.

This showed that Starmer is not just a threat to Labour members’ democratic rights, but of all who criticise Zionism.

It is comparable, in some ways, to Boris Johnson’s illegal manoeuvre to prorogue parliament in the Summer of 2019. This was a kind of coup.

And Starmer/Hoyle carried out their own mini-parliamentary coup against the SNP and any MP in their own party or any other who wanted to vote to demand a permanent ceasefire.

This is an attack on an element of parliamentarism that actually has a democratic content.

Numerous independent socialists around the country are standing against Labour, as well as several left-of-labour political organisations.

The most prominent individual is Jeremy Corbyn himself.

His exclusion from Labour, when only a few years earlier he was the leader of a massive movement against austerity, racism and imperialist war, symbolises why socialists should not be supporting the Starmer-led Labour Party.

Hundreds of thousands of people loyal to Corbyn’s leadership have been impatiently waiting for him to defy Starmer in the election.

Now he has done so, he deserves the support of all in society who have a basic working-class consciousness, along with those fighting oppression and imperialist war, crucially the attempted genocide in Gaza.

But it should be a critical support, as many of Corbyn’s own actions when he was leader, did not help to resist the reactionaries who sought to overthrow him.

Corbyn showed chronic weakness in Labour with the position that he explicitly formulated later in the witchhunt period, that both Zionists and anti-Zionists should work together in Labour.

Jon Lansman of Momentum, who admitted to being a left Zionist, was among his most influential supporters. He played a key role in undermining his leadership.

Even more to the point, Corbyn’s adherence to the view that Zionists and anti-Zionists should work together, meant that when the Zionists came after outspoken opponents of Zionist racism in the party, Corbyn turned the other cheek, which meant throwing them under the bus.

Corbyn’s appointee Jenny Formby, as General Secretary, proved more efficient at purging the pro-Palestinian left in the guise of fighting ‘anti-Semitism’, than her right-wing predecessor McNicol.

So that was disastrous weakness.

He is still at it – in the ‘Collective’ Umbrella he has initiated for this election, and his ‘Peace and Justice’ initiative, ‘left’ Zionists: Justin and Clare Schlosberg, are active.

Justin Schlossberg denounced David Miller, the militant, victimised anti-Zionist professor formerly of Bristol University, as a ‘psyop’.

David Miller who defeated Bristol University at an industrial tribunal, establishing for the first time that anti-Zionist views are a protected belief under British law.

The types are a danger to the left and Palestine supporters. It is terrible to be allying oneself with such people, particularly in these terrible circumstances. It is wrong in principle in any case.

Zionism is a key driver of racism in the Labour Party.

Diane Abbot, the first black woman MP, was deprived of the Labour whip based on phoney allegations of anti-Semitism, driven by Zionists.  Par for the course.

Abbott and her supporters appear to have forced Starmer to reinstate her as a Labour candidate. It is clear that Starmer wanted rid of her, and that she refused to go, and had the clout to insist, and defeat him.

This is because the Labour Party feared to take on black working-class communities in London, and in Britain generally, who still have considerable regard for Diane Abbott.

She is one of the few Labour candidates who deserve a vote in this election. For defying and defeating Starmer.

What happened to Faiza Shaheen is the converse of this. She was outrageously dropped as a candidate in Chingford/Woodford Green on the basis of feeble Zionist smears only a few days before the national candidate selection deadline

A highly regarded left-wing economist of Muslim family background, she was supposed to be crushed by this.

But not so, she denounced the ‘hierarchy of racism’ in Labour.

What this actually means is that Labour has a racial hierarchy, that privileges Jewish and white supremacists over the black and Asian communities.

She is now standing as an independent against the Tory Iain Duncan Smith and the Starmer stooge.

The quintessence of this racial hierarchy is Labour’s parachuting of Luke Akehurst into a safe Labour seat in North Durham.

He is a white supremacist, who as Diane Abbott has noted, had tried repeatedly to get rid of her from her Hackney seat.

He is also an ardent Zionist, but he is not actually Jewish. There is a famous photo of him wearing a T-Shirt bearing the caption “Zionist Shitlord”.

 It appears that his Zionist fervour is driven by his hatred of non-whites – he has deleted thousands of his tweets and social media posts recently to hide this.

One reportedly referred to Palestinians as ‘rats’.  Akehurst is basically a Zionist-Nazi and should be treated as one.

There is a proud working-class history in Durham, as symbolised by the Durham Miners’ Gala. They should ensure his type are better acquainted with the pavement.

George Galloway of the Workers Party is seeking re-election in Rochdale after his recent by-election victory.

There are also some independent candidates standing in Birmingham who are closely associated with GG and the Workers Party.

Jody McIntyre in Yardley against Jess Philipps, and Ahmed Yakoob in Ladywood against Shabana Mahmood.

They are making Gaza a big issue, but not just Gaza. Labour’s more general racism, neoliberalism and contempt for the working class, and particularly the British Asian working class, is crucial here.

Former UK Ambassador and Julian Assange defender Craig Murray is standing for the Workers Party in Blackburn (he may win also).

Chris Williamson, the former very left-wing Labour MP and Deputy Leader of the Workers Party is standing in Derby South, adjacent to his previous Derby North seat.

Former Labour whistleblower (about Zionist lobbying and witchhunts), Halima Khan, is planning to stand in Stratford and Bow, East London, also under the banner of the Workers Party.

George Galloway is excellent on Palestine and Ukraine and has a long and creditable anti-imperialist record.

But in the past decade he has shown softness on right-populism, and some of his followers follow in the same vein and to be treated with caution.

There are political debates to be had with the Workers Party about social conservatism and backwardness on questions involving immigration and oppression, including sexual oppression of various types.

However, Galloway’s views cannot be taken to represent the final word about the Workers Party and its politics. There are signs of it being a more inclusive project than that. 

Galloway himself has appeared to welcome the idea of prominent figures with different views joining with him. If that were to happen, then it could become a real vehicle for political advance.

Williamson, Craig Murray and Halima Khan appear to give substance to that.

Possibly the most prominent independent socialist campaign in London, barring Corbyn, is Andrew Feinstein in Holborn and St Pancras constituency, against Starmer himself.

He is a Jewish former member of the South African Parliament for the African National Congress. He is an outspoken defender of the Palestinians and supporter of South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the ICJ.

He was selected by OCISA (Organise Corbyn-Inspired Socialist Alliance), a left-Corbynite campaign group set up a couple of years ago with the aim of standing a socialist candidate against Keir Starmer.

Labour sees that as threatening politically, which is perhaps why a ‘left’-talking independent candidate, who appears to have family connections with the Labour right wing, is running in that constituency seemingly to split the left-wing opposition to Starmer.

Leanne Mohammad, a British-Palestinian Palestine solidarity activist, is challenging Wes Streeting is in Ilford North. Streeting can be considered an Israeli agent – and he evangelises for private healthcare. His defeat would be a major blow to the Zionists and neoliberals.

There are also the celebrated Liverpool Community Independents, who are standing Sam Gorst against arch-witchhunter Maria Eagle in Liverpool Garston.

They are now standing under the banner of Transform, another new leftist party that is partly the product of ex-Corbynites, notably the very youthful Breakthrough Party, which merged with the remnants of Left Unity as well as the Liverpool Independents last year.

Transform appears heterogenous; it has ‘socialist’ elements who are flatly on the wrong side in Ukraine, mixed with others with better views.

TUSC, which is basically a front for the Socialist Party, is standing in this election.

Its left-reformist sectarian caricature of Marxism makes it appear bureaucratic and sterile, but it does stand for some basic working class demands for trade unions, against privatisation, imperialist wars etc., so it is worthy of critical support in principle.

Though its habit of standing against other leftists gratuitously is part of what renders it sterile.

It does appear they might have a candidate standing under their ticket from the Spartacist League. That is an interesting anomaly. And also critically supportable.

The new Revolutionary Communist Party, formerly the labour entrist Socialist Appeal, that also has its origins in Militant is also standing on politics that appear critically supportable. It appears more political and open to debate.

What is necessary above all is a perspective that seeks to unite all of these fragmented initiatives in a new, democratically organised party, where proper political debates are possible, and thereby unity in action, so that political and programmatic development in a revolutionary direction comes onto the agenda.

The ICC, Western Imperialism and hypocritical double standards

By Kalliste Hill

The ICC, in the person of Karim Khan, finally announced after 7 months they will ask for the arrest of 2 Israeli ministers, Prime Minister Netanyahu and Defence Minister Galant and 3 Hamas leaders, Sinwar, Al-Masri and Hanayeh, after the conspicuous leaks and hysterical outbursts of the Zionist lobby in the US, UK and Israel at the very thought that they might be treated like “African leaders and thugs like Putin”.

However, underneath the hysteria, the mafia-like threats from US congressmen against the ICC prosecutor to sanction not only him, his family and the members of the entire ICC office, including the Judges, lies yet another unbalanced, disingenuous litany of false allegations against the real targets of this action, the Palestinian leadership, while reserving the spotlight of public opinion and victim-waving for the Israelis.

The long list of “crimes” against the Palestinian targets include the chief negotiator as well as the prime Palestinian target marked out assassination by Netanyahu and the Israeli UN ambassador in public and on the floor of the UN.

It’s almost as if the ICC, far from any real intention to actually drag Netanyahu into the dock, is actually reinforcing the ludicrous and demonstrably false allegations made by Israel against Hamas, which excuses they’ve used to commit genocide against the Palestinian people for the past 76 years. They are reciting yet again the reasons why Israel will continue to pursue its policy of political assassinations and fomenting regime change for those who already support the Zionist cause while creating more panic and fear amongst those who see the existence of the state of Israel, even anapartheid, ethno-fascist state, as it is at the moment, as existential, when the reality is that it should go the way of White South Africa, to be replaced by a secular state based on equality and social justice.

After all, the US has already passed laws that ensure no US citizen, or now any proxy under their protection, will be protected from prosecution by the ICC in perpetuity. What do Netanyahu and Galant really have to fear? Whereas all Palestinians, and especially their political leaders have every reason to know that they, their family members and all who work with them, are under sentence of death at the hands of the Zionists who rule Israel, and control our Empire of Lies.

Communist Fight Series 2, issue 4 is Out Now!

This issue centres on the General Election, and the Gaza genocide, and also refers to the Ukraine war.

The lead article is an extensive and detailed analysis of the various parties and trends standing in the General Election. It concretely makes it clear why the Labour Party is not supportable – the current leadership is one that has waged a class war against all elements within it who aspire to stand up for workers and the oppressed. The Zionism of this leadership was always genocidal, and it is pretty clear in hindsight that there was plenty of conscious understanding of this among the various ‘Friends of Israel’ and ‘Jewish Labour Movement’ witchhunters who targeted the Corbyn movement.

Starmer’s clear endorsement of the use of starvation/dehydration and deprivation of power as a weapon of genocide after the break out from the Gaza concentration camp on 7th October, caused a major crisis in the Labour Party, with many defections, including of sitting councillors, who often retained their seats in the local elections in May. Now there is a layer of socialist-inclined independents standing all over the country against Labour – the most prominent being Jeremy Corbyn himself, as well as at least four national left-wing organisations, most prominently the Workers Party of George Galloway. The main article gives life to the concept of critical support, elaborating in some depth the strengths and weaknesses of the various trends and putting forward a perspective of what is necessary to create a cohesive and democratic socialist alternative to bankrupt neoliberal social democracy.

The article on the back cover also contains useful material on the election, in the form of an account of a public debate between two left-wing trends, with the CPGB-Weekly Worker advocating votes for Starmer’s genocidal leadership in the election, and the Spartacist League opposing it. The rightward motion of the CPGB-WW is evident here; during the whole Blairite period they were opponents of the left hustling votes for the pro-privatisation, warmongering Blairites. But now that Starmer has taken that a stage further and publicly endorsed openly genocidal actions, they suddenly click their heels and denounce those hundreds of thousands of class-conscious militants who abhor voting for Starmer as ‘third period’-ists, “Ohlerites” and similar nonsense. “Left” Islamophobia and softness on Zionism are what is driving their drift into the Starmer camp. Their opponents in the debate, the Spartacists, have ironically some similar flaws, but on the issue being debated: for or against voting for Starmers openly righwing Labour, they are correct.

Another article, an edited transcript of the presentation at the forum we held on the genocide at the beginning of May, gives a lot more historical and contemporary detail about the roots of the genocide, as well as its relationship with the decline of US hegemony and the rise of resistance to that hegemony from a block of the global South with the ex-workers states of Russia and China.

As well as these substantial articles, we have a number of short pieces on the war in Ukraine, the arrest warrants that are in train from the ICC against Israeli leaders, and also an update on the recent partial legal victory of Julian Assange at the Court of Appeal on May 20. And we have a brief piece by our Argentinian comrades on the 9 May General Strike against the fascist-inclined President of Argentina, Javier Milei, and the ferocious attacks he is carrying out against the working class of that country as part of a US-funded counteroffensive of recolonisation in Latin America.

Debate on the Left: No Vote for Zionist New Labour!

Spartacists v CPGB/Weekly Worker

The 9th May article in the Weekly Worker on the online debate between the Spartacist League and the CPGB, Debating with Oehlerites (https://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1490/debating-with-oehlerites/) , shows nothing so much as the rightward political evolution of the CPGB, as well as some contradictory and problematic aspects of the political evolution of the Spartacist tendency since the death of their founder-leader James Robertson in 2018. The WW polemic against today’s reformed Spartacists as ‘Ohlerites’ (akin to Hugo Ohler, a sectarian critic of the Trotskyist movement in the 1930s) is frankly absurd, as it has not been demonstrated that faced with a genuinely leftward moving opportunity in the Labour Party, such as actually existed in the recent past with the Corbyn movement, today’s Spartacist League would simply abstain and refuse to intervene.

Seems reasonable to us…

James Robertson, the US American leader of the Spartacists, died (aged over 90) right in the middle of Corbyn’s leadership, and even before his death the Spartacists were politically paralysed and engaging in an agonised and confused political soul-searching about aspects of his legacy. Particularly involving allegations of chauvinism against oppressed peoples, which just before his death were unconvincingly blamed on Joseph Seymour, one of his senior lieutenants, excusing Robertson himself. During the Corbyn project, the ‘new’ Spartacists did not yet exist, and it appears that the old group went into a state of political collapse and only re-emerged, in a somewhat contradictory and less-than-fully rational manner, in the aftermath of the Covid pandemic. That could be subject of another exploration, but it is not relevant here.

The point is that the SL’s involvement in TUSC is itself evidently proof that they are not Ohlerites. TUSC is itself a left-social democratic project – ‘Ohlerites’ would treat involvement in it as a heresy. Evidently the SL today see involvement in social democratic organisations as a valid tactic, their disagreement with the CPGB appears to be about which social-democratic trend to conduct political work within. In our view they are mistaken to see TUSC as the optimum milieu to conduct communist political work within today, as it is a project that, though it gets some semi-respectable votes in a few places, stands a lot of merely paper candidates that routinely get derisory votes and have done for many years.

Ridiculous CPGB polemic in favour of kissing the arse of genocidare “Sir Keir”.

It is a sterile project, dominated by what Mike MacNair accurately terms “sectarian purity politics combined with sub-reformism”. Without the RMT and the CPB, TUSC has long been a Socialist Party ‘front’ – and their sectarian boorishness and sub-reformism makes it deeply unappealing to those radicalised by the genocide in Gaza. Their policy statements on Gaza are very vague and bland, limited to ‘opposing’ the Israeli ‘war on Gaza’. Behind the scenes, the Socialist Party’s own statement after the October 7th prison break equated the two sides:

“Once again, in this new round of Israel-Palestine conflict, many civilians have already been killed and injured. The leaders of both sides have no hesitation in terrorising civilians whether it be the history of the Israeli state in Lebanon and Gaza or the Hamas leaders in their 7 October offensive. The killing of around 260 young people on Saturday at a ‘rave’ will not bring progress in the fight for liberation but was an attempt to terrorise the Israeli population, which can play into the hands of the ultra-right Israeli government.”

https://www.socialistparty.org.uk/articles/116365/09-10-2023/stop-the-israel-gaza-war-for-workers-unity-and-struggle-against-national-conflict-and-oppression/

More recently, on 15th May, their article titled “Mass workers’ struggle can end slaughter in Gaza” put forward the following key demand as a ‘solution’ to the Palestinian liberation struggle:

“For an independent, socialist Palestinian state, alongside a socialist Israel, with guaranteed rights for all minorities, as part of the struggle for a socialist Middle East

https://www.socialistparty.org.uk/articles/124705/15-05-2024/mass-workers-struggle-can-end-slaughter-in-gaza/

For all its rhetoric, this is a caricature of a socialist programme, as Israel was created through the forcible expulsion of the indigenous Palestinian Arab people of Palestine, who are not a ‘minority’ anywhere, but the overwhelming, legitimate majority over the whole territory of Palestine from the River Jordan to the Mediterranean Sea. Such is the conservative bureaucratic politics in TUSC in practice that it is not difficult to confuse these statements on this with that of the British TUC after October 7th, such as:

“We unequivocally condemn the attacks by Hamas and their targeting of civilians in this recent escalation of violence. Nothing can justify such an attack.”

[…]

“Finally, we reiterate our support for a just, comprehensive and lasting peace that is consistent with international law and is based on a two-state solution, security for both Israel and Palestine, and which promotes equality and respect for human and labour rights.”

https://www.tuc.org.uk/news/tuc-statement-israel-and-palestine

The policy of the Socialist Party, the main force (by far) in TUSC, is only a ‘socialist’ phrase or two different from that of the TUC! No wonder TUSC is considerably less inspiring and capable of mobilising struggles against oppression than was the Labour Party in the late 2010s under Corbyn’s leadership!

The Spartacist League of old used to excoriate, and even try to incite Irish Republicans against, anyone who would work with the Socialist Party in the late 1990s/early 2000s Socialist Alliance because their similar ‘both sides’-ism over Ireland meant softness on Ulster loyalism just as today on Zionism. Even though the old SL shared much of the SP’s ‘both sides’-ism over Ireland with their slogan ‘Not Green against Orange but Class against Class’, and their opposition to ‘forcible’ Irish reunification. They disguised that behind virulent sectarian provocations and idiocy, which they thankfully appear to have abandoned.   But TUSC, unlike the Socialist Alliance in the late 1990s/early 2000s, is a sterile SP front.

Entry into TUSC is a mistaken tactic, that quite likely has strategic and opportunist aspects to it. Better to give TUSC a degree of critical support from the outside and try to play a role in cohering something better as we are doing in the Socialist Labour Network. But the Spartacist League are quite right to refuse support for Labour in current circumstances under Starmer’s leadership and there is nothing ‘Ohlerite’ about that refusal.

Bourgeois Workers Parties: Concrete not Abstract

A bourgeois workers party, by its very nature, is a party with a class contradiction built into it, a party with two contradictory class poles, a proletarian element at the base, that may coexist with other elements, either oppressed groups that are not purely proletarian in composition, or elements of the petty-bourgeoisie who also make up part of the base of the party. And the other pole is the labour bureaucracy, initially connected to the bureaucracy of mass trade unions, but it doesn’t have to stay that way.

As well as a pro-capitalist labour bureaucracy element, Labour also has an extensive political bureaucracy which has considerable autonomy in dealing with other sections of society, particularly elements of the ruling class. With the de-industrialisation and financialisation of imperialist countries such as Britain under the neoliberal paradigm since the 1970s, we also see that this semi-autonomous political bureaucratic element can grow and become complicit with elements of financial, as opposed to industrial, capital, and wander a long way from the traditional politics of the right-wing of the trade union bureaucracy.  Thus, we see Blairism, Starmerism, and the growth of neoconservative bourgeois politics in Labour, and not least an expanded role for Zionism.

As a bourgeois workers party, sometimes the proletarian pole within Labour is capable of fighting back, and in such periods critical support and entryism is appropriate, as in the Corbyn period. We in the Consistent Democrats, the main British Group affiliated to the Liaison Committee for the Fourth International, were then in Socialist Fight, which did engage in work within the Labour Party in that crucial period. If that opportunity arose again, we would do the same, though in current conditions that is unlikely. But it is difficult to call us ‘Ohlerites’ particularly given our work in the Socialist Labour Network, which is in part the continuity of Labour Against the Witchhunt (also the former Labour-In-Exile Network) and which organises a significant layer of the most advanced ex-Labour militants. We were pivotal in changing the policy of the SLN from one of neutrality in the war in Ukraine to one of critically supporting the struggle of the people of the Donbass, and the Russian side, against NATO’s Nazi proxy war.

In a period where the proletarian pole of Labour is driven back by the right-wing, and particularly today’s neoliberal, massively corrupt and bribed neoliberal/Blairite right-wing, in hock to Thatcherite privatisation, Zionism and the Israeli attempt to exterminate the people of Gaza, the Spartacist League are quite correct to agitate against voting for Starmer on the mass Palestine demonstrations. We would critically support that. Our criticism is that some of the literature the SL has put out about Gaza and October 7th has shown too much of a tendency to accept the demonisation of Hamas, who it is clear did not seek mass civilian casualties, as Scott Ritter correctly noted. We are also sharply critical of their failure to take sides with Russia and the people of Donbass in the current Ukrainian proxy war, which is another crucially important anti-imperialist struggle.

Not only are the SL absurdly characterised as ‘Ohlerites’. McNair is also quoted as arguing for:

“…fighting for working class unity requires the pursuit of the united front – including from above with rightwing leaders of the labour movement. We do not simply regard them as ‘social fascists’: ie, as untouchables. The SL’s claim that voting Labour is crossing class lines, or to vote for anybody who would back a Starmer government crosses class lines, argued comrade Macnair, is what Leon Trotsky dismissed as the ‘third period’ theory of Comintern.”

WW, op-cit

Here McNair resorts to Sean Matgamna-style dishonest demagogy.  “Third period” Stalinism was a cynical, bureaucratic pseudo-ultraleft policy formulated by the Soviet bureaucracy to obscure the Stalin faction’s previous rightist policy of conciliation of capitalism abroad and rich, exploiting peasants (kulaks) at home. These led to the destruction of the 1926-27 Chinese revolution and a 1928 kulak revolt that came close to overthrowing Soviet power. “Third period” Stalinism (1929-33) was not a reflection of the mood of an advanced part of the working class, it was a bureaucratic policy from above to fool the advanced working class. Completely unlike anything today.

If German Social Democracy, hypothetically speaking, had been directly complicit in Hitler’s (coming) genocide of Jews in the way that Starmer’s Zionist Labour Party is complicit in Israel’s  genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza (for which they are rightly hated), then the Stalinist epithet ‘social fascist’ might have had some justification. But in the actual historical situation that was impossible. In fact, the Stalinist bureaucratic policy of the ‘Third Period’ played a major role in sabotaging the united front of the German workers against Hitler’s Nazi movement that actually threatened such a genocide at the time. So, what is MacNair suggesting, that the left should form a ‘united front’ with Der Stűrmer to save the Palestinians from genocide? What the hell?

Starmer made it very clear that he supported Zionism, which now stands utterly exposed as the Nazism of today, “without qualification” as he grabbed for the Labour leadership after stabbing Corbyn in the back. Starmer is himself a genocidal racist, who rose to power in Labour with the support of Political Zionism and the Labour Friends of Israel, Jewish Labour Movement, etc, which as is visible to all now, is the hegemonic, open form of genocidal racism of today, which has the bulk of the imperialist ruling classes dancing to its tune. MacNair’s polemic is a damned insult against all those who suffered from the Zionist filth in Labour!

The polemic goes on. MacNair

“…in his response described the Spartacist position as ‘classic ultra-leftism’ of the sort attacked in Lenin’s Leftwing communism … it mistakes the mood of a section of the advanced part of the class for the mood of the broad masses. Yes, there is hatred of Starmer expressed by hundreds of thousands on Palestine demonstrations, but millions are supporting Labour in elections. They are not doing so under the illusion that Labour will bring socialism, or that it defends the fully independent interests of the working class. The illusion is that Labour will partially defend workers’ interests within the frame of the constitution and the nation.”

WW op-cit

CPGB support for Starmer: Another Capitulation to Zionism

This an example of rightward motion by the CPGB and softness on what Starmer represents politically. Lenin in Left Wing Communism attacked those ultraleft communists who refused on principle to support any candidates in bourgeois elections, and to stand communist candidates in such elections. The WW polemic is bizarre, as the Spartacist League apparently are standing a candidate under the TUSC banner in the upcoming election, and many others of those who oppose voting for Starmer are planning to stand, or support, independent leftist candidates themselves. It seems that for the CPGB, the epithet ‘Ohlerite’ is reserved for those who fail to kiss Starmer’s arse.

 This is shown by their respectful address to Starmer as “Sir Keir” in their coverage when the vernacular of those who have been through the mill of the Zionist witchhhunts in Labour is more often “Der Stűrmer”, “Kid Starver” or sometimes “Keith Stalin”. The absence of socialist or class illusions in Starmer’s Labour is because Starmer’s strategy is to win over alienated Tory voters by appearing to them as a slightly less deranged kind of Tory. That is why he excluded Jeremy Corbyn and Diane Abbott from the parliamentary party, while welcoming in anti-immigrant scum like Natalie Elphicke. That is why Starmer can be opposed from the left by far-right Tory vermin like Suella Braverman (!!) when she called for an end to the two-child cap on child benefit, which Kid Starver is pledged to carry on with. That is why Starmer wraps his party up with the Union Jack to the point that his flag-shagging has become a sick joke and the object of hatred by those targeted by the far right.

But even more so, there is the overt Zionism of the Labour Party. In an earlier period, when Tony Blair was rising to become prime minister, and for the whole of the Blair/Brown government’s 13 years in power, the CPGB made a point about not calling for a vote to New Labour. They strongly opposed supporting New Labour in the 1997, 2001, 2005 and 2010 General Elections, because of new Labour’s overt Thatcherism, which was not some obscure point of doctrine but the whole basis of its attempt to win over Tory voters. They correctly opposed this because of what they called the “De-Labourisation of Labour”.  Now they call for votes for Starmer’s Labour and denounce as ‘Ohlerities’ those who refuse to snap to attention and vote for ‘Sir Keir’.

This is an index of their political softness on Zionism. The CPGB grandstands that

“Of course, the Spartacist League was nowhere to be seen in the 2015‑20 class war which raged inside the Labour Party. The CPGB, by contrast, through Labour Party Marxists, played a leading role in Labour Against the Witchhunt.”

WW op-cit

But their role was not so creditable as their braggadocio pretends. It would be justifiable to say that the CPGB turned Labour Against the Witchhunt, as originally conceived, into something that could justly be called Labour Against the Witchhunt (sic!). Under their stewardship, Labour Against the Witchhunt had its own witchhunts, some of which achieved national publicity, against those who were too consistent in their anti-Zionism, and analysed the material roots of the power of the Zionist lobby in Marxist terms.

Such as Socialist Fight, our political forerunner. who for our Marxist analysis of the Jewish question today were thrown out of Labour Against the Witchhunt by the CPGB and its then allies. Our comrade Gerry Downing was thrown out of the Labour Party after being denounced as a supposed ‘terrorist’ supporter by David Cameron and was then subjected to a prolonged witchhunt for supposed ‘anti-Semitism’ for referring to facts about the social weight of Zionist Jews in the ruling class, which are increasingly obvious today as one of the key driving forces of Western support for genocide and also repression in the imperialist countries against the pro-Palestine, anti-genocide student movement.

The CPGB originally lost the vote when the motion to purge SF was put to the meeting of LAW in December 2017, and SF stayed in. So WW declared a national mobilisation to throw us out, which they duly did, at an enlarged meeting in January 2018 where they ‘won’ by approximately two to one, having mobilised pro-imperialist pseudo-lefts like the supporters of Socialist Resistance, the British USFI group (now known as Anti-Capitalist Resistance), who are known for their support for the US/UK invasion of Libya in 2011, the reactionary US/Israel-sponsored jihadist war to overthrow Assad in Syria (which was foiled by Russia and Hizbullah), and now the NATO imperialist Nazi proxy war in Ukraine.

If you choose to block with such elements, it is purely accidental if you get a majority for a purge.  But a pro-Zionist, pro-imperialist witchhunt is what it was, and the rightward motion of the CPGB is shown today by their cynical deployment of the language of the Trotskyist movement against people who oppose their political softness on Starmer.

There is nothing orthodox Marxist or owing to the early Congresses of the revolutionary Comintern about the CPGB’s critique of the Spartacist League, as they claim. The CPGB reject the Comintern and the Russian Revolution itself as models for revolutionaries to seek to emulate.  As MacNair’s writings reveal, they prefer the politics of pre-1914 Karl Kautsky, the centrism that laid the basis for the destruction of the Second International and the necessity for a third. Their softness on Starmer and his genocidal Zionist Labour Party has deep roots in their own affinity for reformism and their fealty to the political method of Hal Draper, the ‘third camp’ theorist of later forms of pro-imperialist social democracy that have given the false impression that the Zionist neoconservatives had something to do with the Trotskyist movement.

They do not, but the politics of the CPGB and the Alliance for Workers Liberty, who the CPGB tried to fuse with in the early 2000s, have also a common root in the politics of Hal Draper, one of whose earliest tracts, titled How to defend Israel (https://www.marxists.org/archive/draper/1948/07/israel.htm) put a ‘socalist’ gloss on the Nakba of the Palestinians. Ironically, to a degree the Spartacists under Robertson’s also had roots in Shachtmanism, which seriously flawed their own politics on West Asia. But this debate had a left and a right, and it is useful for the left and political clarity to get a proper view and orientation of what the protagonists represent.

Presentation on Zionism and Gaza Situation – 12th May 2024

Zionists plan another massacre at Rafah, threatening these makeshift refugee camps with carnage seen earlier.

The presentation and discussion at our forum this afternoon can also be heard here as a podcast

We are now witnessing the brutal forced evacuation of East and Central Rafah, the Southernmost city in the Gaza Strip, adjoining Egypt, to a tiny coastal enclave.

This is going to be another, even more brutal massacre that those that have taken place previously further North. Because the population has nowhere really to flee to

So far, Israel has not been able order them to leave Gaza for Sinai/Egypt.  

That is significant and a product of their being outmaneuvered by Hamas, who jointly put together a plan to end the Israeli massacre with Qatar and Egypt.

It had implicit US support, arguably, as both Qatar and Egypt are strong US allies.

But Israel rejected the plan.

It would have been a defeat for them.

A permanent ceasefire means a defeat for Israel.

The US and Israel’s other imperialist allies know that a permanent ceasefire means Israeli defeat.

That is why the demand for it is like trying to get blood out of a stone.

But Israel is now over-extended both militarily and politically, and under enormous pressure.

Rafah is the last fig leaf to disguise Israeli defeat.

 They can again kill many civilians, but they have no chance to wipe out Hamas. They will take casualties here also.

The attempt to divert attention from this by aggression against Iran has failed.

So, we are back at the sharp edge of the genocide again.

They were resuming demands for evacuations in Gaza City yesterday, Dropping leaflets telling people to flee, so they can ‘deal with’ Hamas.

Déjà vu. They are supposed to have won that months ago. But no.

The Biden administration is desperately trying to reconcile the irreconcilable. They are desperate for this carnage to end, not because of any humanitarian motive.

But because it is radicalizing their population and upsetting Biden’s election campaign.

It should be clear now that in the seven months of wanton slaughter than have gone on since 7/10 they have no qualms about the Israelis massacring Palestinian civilians.–

As long as they thought it might win them something.

But now it is clear that Israel is not going to defeat, let alone ‘eliminate’ Hamas.

Their bloodthirsty, barbaric, racist army, the most cowardly and immoral in the world, can butcher tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of civilians, in the most rapid slaughter since Rwanda in 1994, but they cannot defeat the Palestinian resistance.

What is happening instead is that the young population of the West is being radicalized.

From being exposed to this butchery and genocide.

The US ruling class is trying to ban TikTok because it has kept US youth informed of the crimes Israel is carrying out in Gaza, and indeed the accelerating repression in the West Bank as well.

But it is too late. The cat is out of the bag already, Once people see what Israel is doing, they cannot un-see it. The Zionists complain of youth being  ‘radicalised’ by their crimes and ridiculously compare the results of their own work with 1930s anti-semitism.

Totally insulting to the most basic intelligence since Zionist barbarism is similar to Nazi barbarism.

 Student youth are organising protest camps in hundreds of Unis and Colleges in the US.

Pitched battles are taking place with violent cops, acting under orders from Zionist and White Supremacist politicians the length and breadth of imperialist North America, from Colombia University in New York to UCLA on the West Coast, from Texas to Canada.

There are Gaza protest encampments in Harvard and Yale, the US’ most elite universities. They all demand divestments of University assets from Israel and Zionist companies, and an end to the frequent military-academic collaboration that regularly goes on.

This has spread to Europe. In France and Germany, there have been pitched battles between students and the cops.

In Spain, 76 universities have acted collectively to suspend ties with ‘complicit’ Israeli universities via the Conference of University Rectors.

In Britain, student protests and encampments are likewise spreading throughout the country. Protests are underway at Oxbridge universities, among other places.

Sunak is complaining and trying to incite repression here also.

Oxford and Cambridge, Sorbonne, Harvard and Yale, as well as less salubrious universities are heavily involved. The elite – this is destabilitising the youth of the bourgeoiisie’s most treasured.

Student protests are still continuing though the imperialist world and spreading even though repressed quite savagely.

Young people are prepared to risk their futures, because they are less and less convinced that they have a future in a society dominated by genocidaires and corporate climate deniers.

This is evidently a global student movement. It has been compared to the student movements around the Vietnam war. I think it may prove even more significant than that!

 But it is misleading, and misreading, the situation to see it as simply a student protest movement.

It is a movement of the intelligentsia that prefigures what society itself is thinking, in its depths.

 This is actually confirmed by many public opinion polls in the advanced countries, Israel’s allies, sponsors, and lackeys, where clear majorities strongly disapprove of Israel’s genocidal onslaught, and consider it to be a genocide,

The decision in January of the International Court of Justice, to state publicly that there is a plausible, prima facie case to accuse Israel of genocide, was a reflection of that popular pressure, months before the student movements took off.

This is a very bourgeois institution, designed from the start as a kind of safety switch for imperialism so it can amnesty itself, indict its opponents and excuse its allies.

The ICJ’s ‘provisional measures’ were and are a joke, responding to South Africa’s indictment by calling on Israel to stop what they are doing and protect the civilian population they would like to dispose of.

Fat chance – if they were remotely inclined to any of that, this issue would not exist in the first place.

So is the International Criminal Court, for that matter, which has threatened to indict Netanyahu, Gallant and others.

Their usual activity is in trying to indict the West’s opponents, like Putin, Milosevic, and various black African leaders.

They have not (yet) actually indicted Netanyahu and may indeed back off under pressure.

But the possibility is real, as shown by the letter of 10 GOP senators threatening the ICC with military sanctions if they do.

However, the fact that the bodies feel compelled to say anything remotely in the right ball part if a reflection of the mass sentiment.

Not just the overwhelming sentiment in the global South, over which South Africa has made the running politically, and  very strongly in terms of perceived ‘morality’, which should not be dismissed.

But in terms of the knowledge that the ruling classes in general, in the imperialist West, have about the huge damage that is being done to their moral authority over the masses at home.

Mass student protest movements are often the harbinger of much more convulsive social and political movements.

I could go through a long list, from the role of ferment among students and intelligentsia in influencing the masses and leading to the growth of a mass communist movement in Russia in the late 19th/early 20th century,

There is the huge role of students in assembling the intellectual forces for anti-colonial and anti-imperialist movements throughout the world.

And in a more recent time frame, there is the role of the mass student movement in France in the late 1960s, the student radicals who fought the CRS in Paris and other places, in a mixture of home-grown social discontent and anti-imperialist radicalism centred again on Vietnam.

This student movement managed to coalesce with a mass movement of working-class discontent, and the working class anger in France burst out in a huge outburst, a general strike, that forced Charles De Gaulle himself to flee the country.

Until the dependable forces of the French Communist Party were able to restore order and get the working class to return to work.

This activity led to the discredit of the very reformist CP at the time and the growth of large organisations of the far left in France in the 1970s.

That is not the subject of this forum, we are in very different circumstances today. What we are faced with now is understanding where we are at now, and what to fight for.

What is possible, and likely, is major working-class movements akin to May 1968 with revolutionary implications, from this crisis.

We must be alert and participate in them to the best of our ability when that happens, as communists.

We are a very different situation now. The US achieved full world hegemony after the destruction of the USSR, and Zionist power in the world was massively enhanced through its factions within the US and European imperialist ruling classes.

As long as the USSR existed, the bipolar world, Zionist power was somewhat overshadowed by the need for the US to concentrate on its own offensive against the workers states.

When the USSR collapsed, we had the situation of the unipolar world, where the US’s world hegemony appeared unchallenged.

We had the situation beginning in the early 1990s when Israel appeared to be able to get the United States to fight its wars for it.

There was an element about that in the 1991 Iraq war; Israel had a definite interest in cutting Iraq down to size and given the US’ own recent alliance with Iraq, the manner in which Hussein was lured into Iraq by the US ambassador April Glaspie was suspicious, to say the least.

The second Iraq war, however, in 2003, the successful US/UK invasion and then failed occupation  of Iraq, has Zionism and necons written all over it.

It was always Israeli policy to find ways to prevent any successful regional power from emerging that could challenge their ‘right’ to dispossess the Palestinians.

This drove all their wars, but finding a sympathetic hegemon to wage them was not so simple.

It proved not so simple in 1956, when the US and USSR united against Britain and France to put them back in their box.

They had more luck in 1967, still with tactic French support, but seemingly acting alone to defeat Nasser, Assad and the King of Jordan.

But the ambiguity of the relationship with the US was shown by the USS Liberty

In 1973 they were threatened with reversal of 1967 by forces that were still seen as Soviet allied: Nixon saw Israel for the first time as a strategic ally and put US forces on alert to stop them being defeated.

But the 1990s until the mid-20-teens were the heyday of Zionism, coinciding with the ‘unipolar world’, when the world appeared to be Israel’s oyster and the US would fight its wars for them.

Those days are over. Because the unipolar world is ending. The ‘Arab Spring’, that inchoate upsurge of mass ‘democratic’ struggle in the Arab world, exploited by imperialism, also showed the beginning of the end for this hegemony.

The destruction of Libya followed the pattern of Iraq.

But the failure in Syria was because Russia reasserted its power, against the US, the neocons and the Zionists, and refused to allow them to destroy Syria, which would have been a major triumph for the Zionists.

We do know the evidence that Israel gave material help, and medical help, to the mercenary jihadists in this war. The destruction of the Assads was always a key priority of Zionism. No Sinai type deal was possible over Golan for this reason.

This is a key reason why the struggle against Zionism, and the struggle against the NATO war in Ukraine, have proved interdependent.

It is the demise of US Hegemony which is leading to the decline of Zionism also.

There is the ideological overlap between the Ukrainian proxy of the US, and Israel.

Zelensky is a Zionist who was carefully groomed to camouflage the Nazi character of the Maidan regime in Ukraine after 2014.

Zelensky expressed his solidarity with Israel after 7 Oct.

Ihor Kolmoisky, the Israeli-Ukrainian oligarch who stumped up the funds to found the notorious Nazi Avov Brigade.

Whose original symbol was the Wolfsangel, which was the symbol of the Das Reich division of the SS that committed atrocities in occupied France, among other places.

This confluence between Nazism and Zionism has a long history, and goes back to the 1930s and then WWII, with Zionists collaboration with the Nazis in order gain approval for their state project in Palestine.

Tony Greenstein, who I have had many disagreements with on Zionism and Anti-Semitism, wrote a worthwhile and serious book on this, Zionism and the Holocaust. It is reviewed on our website, I recommend the book and the review.

So, what is behind Zionism’s apparent strength?

The secret of its power is that part of the Israeli ruling class lives outside its borders, in the US, in West Europe, and is organised as an imperialist faction primarily loyal to Israel.

Israel effectively has an extra-territorial citizenship law which makes that possible.

It’s an imperialist formation, and its presence makes Israel an imperialist power of medium strength.

If this external faction did not exist it would be a minor imperialist power like Denmark. But it’s more powerful than that.

The power of this formation came from the top-heavy social structure of the mainly Askenazi Jewish population in Europe, as a medieval trading class.

See Abram Leon, The Jewish Question – a Marxist Interpretation.

This trading class became obsolete under late feudalism. The Jewish population was marked by it, an obsolete class whose remnants were subjected to religious persecution.

But they were emancipated by the bourgeois revolutions.

Under capitalism this population was naturally more intellectual and bourgeois than the mainstream populations that did not have that class legacy.

So, Jews were disproportionately intellectuals, who having experience of persecution, played an important progressive role in democratic, socialist and working-class movements.

But another layer of Jews was disproportionately successful in business.

And disproportionate capitalist property gives disproportionate social power in a capitalist society where the chief social power is the bourgeoisie.

In my view the Jewish Question is a legacy of a European pre-capitalist phenomenon involving this trading/middleman class, that spilled over into the epoch of progressive capitalism.

When capitalism ceased to be progressive and became imperialist, its interaction with imperialism gave rise to two complementary imperialist movements.

Racial anti-Semitism and Zionism, both of which proved ultimately genocidal. 

Both logically sought to dispose of whole populations that were unwanted in their respective imperialist projects.

We saw the genocidal proclivities of racial anti-semitism against the Jews themselves, played out in the Second World War. as Gemany lost its own bid for world imperialist hegemony.

Now, as US imperialism, Zionism’s ‘host’ so-to-speak, is in the process of losing its world hegemony, we are seeing Zionism’s genocidal proclivities played out.

The Palestinian Arab population of what claims to be ‘Israel’ is equally unwanted. They are still the majority in historic Palestine.

If the right to return of those driven out since 1948 were won, they would be the substantial majority. The Israeli rulers wants this demographic threat eliminated.

Fortunately, they are losing. But it is not clear just how destructive they are prepared to be as they face defeat.

Will they commit suicide, as per Masada? Or will they try to destroy humanity as they fall – Samson option. It’s an open question.

Is Israel trying to provoke WWIII to stave off Gaza genocide defeat?

Support Iran’s right to self-defence!

Defend the Axis of Resistance, against Zionist/US/NATO bloc!

Joint statement of LCFI and ClassConscious.org   

In the early hours of Sunday, 14th April, Iran fired, in three waves, more than 300 drones, missiles and finally more sophisticated, possibly hypersonic ballistic missiles at Israel. Most of them appear to have been intercepted by Israel’s air defences or those of its imperialist allies, the US, France and Britain, except for the third wave, which significantly damaged Nevatim and Ramon airbases in the Negev area, and an intelligence centre in the Golan Heights area, all of which were instrumental in Israel’s earlier act of aggression against Iran’s mission in Syria.

This retaliation was for the Israeli air attack on an Iranian diplomatic building in Damascus, Syria on 1st April, an annex of the Iranian Embassy itself. By the Vienna Convention, embassy buildings are regarded throughout the world as being part of the territory of the state the embassy serves. Israel’s attack on the Damascus building was thus regarded by the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran as an attack on Iranian territory itself. It was an overt act of war and bound at some point to provoke some kind of Iranian military attack on Israeli territory.

The building Israel destroyed contained seven members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRCG), including the commander of its Quds force, Brigadier General Mohammad Reza Zahedi, and his deputy, Mohammad Hadi Haji Rahimi. All-in-all 16 were killed by Israel. The presence of the senior IRCG figures was part of Iran’s military-political relationship with the Lebanese government, which includes the Shi’a resistance organisation Hizbullah, which has twice defeated near-genocidal Israeli invasions of Lebanon which massacred Palestinians and Lebanese Shia, going back as far as 1978. The Israelis scream that the presence of the highly efficient IRCG meant that the building was “not an embassy”, but every significant power in the world that has allies that it seeks to defend from third party attack uses diplomatic premises to further military collaboration with such allies.

Everyone knows that the CIA and Mossad habitually use US and Israeli Embassy buildings around the world to further their aims in terms of both military objectives and espionage. The criteria Israel tries to use to excuse attacking the Damascus Iranian Embassy could be used equally well to justify attacking every single US and Israeli Embassy on the planet. The Iranian military presence was part of the ‘Axis of Resistance’ to Israeli activities in West Asia, activities in pursuit of its aim of a Greater Israel though conquest and genocide of the Palestinian people and more besides, with some renderings of Greater Israel encompassing the whole of Jordan, most of Syria, Iraq up to the River Euphrates and Egypt up to the Nile.

In the case of Syria, everyone knows that Iran and Hizbullah not only defend Syria against direct US and Israeli aggression, but also have played a major role over more than a decade, along with Russia, in thwarting attempts by pro-imperialist jihadist proxies trying to reproduce the destruction of Libya by such proxies, and actual US, British and French intervention forces, in 2011 and after. It is now quite well known that Al Qaeda and ISIS reactionary jihadists have when wounded been given medical treatment by Israel.  The Israeli Islamophobic propaganda offensive against Hamas, accusing them of being akin to Daesh/IS, that they have waged since Oct 7th at the very least, can be defined according to the traditional Jewish term chutzpah, a classic rendering of which is the story of the man who murdered both his parents and then attempted to plead for mercy because he was now an orphan.

The Israeli attack was part not only of its current genocidal campaign against the people of Gaza, but also of this attempt to destabilise and destroy Syria. Iran is now de-facto an ally of Russia and China, both implicitly through its membership of the BRICS bloc, which it joined in January, but also though its membership of the Shanghai Cooperation Council. In that sense, this in turn carries echoes of not merely an anti-Iran agenda from the Zionist genocidaire regime, but also of an anti-Russian, anti-Chinese agenda that merges with the Zionist regime’s more traditional hatreds and obsessions, of Palestinians – of Muslim, Christian and other creeds — other local Arab peoples, and Arabs and other Muslim peoples more generally. Attacks on both Mosques and Churches during the genocide in Gaza, most notably the Al Aqsa Mosque itself, certainly indicate that. All these reactionary missions merge into one in terms of Israel’s attacks on Iran’s presence in Syria. And these occurrences, though they have some autonomy, fit in with the wider drive towards generalised conflict between the forces loyal to the US, seeking to preserve its worldwide imperialist hegemony, and those forces led by Russia and China seeking to reduce the US to just one part of a ‘multipolar world’.

Zionism Facing Defeat

The real nature of Israel is eminently visible in the genocidal murder of over 40,000 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip since the prison breakout of 7th October, the deliberate creation of a deadly famine through the blocking of food, water and fuel to Gaza, publicly announced in advance by the Israeli regime, by the destruction of Gaza’s infrastructure, healthcare, education facilities, etc., and the deliberate displacement through mass terrorisation of the overwhelming majority of its 2.3 million people. As well as the creeping extension of the methods Israel is using in Gaza to the West Bank and the massive wave of arrests, detentions, settler and state killings and ethnic cleansing that is escalating there also.

But the problem is that for all the genocidal slaughter it has carried out over the last six months, Israel is not winning in Gaza. It has failed to eliminate and defeat Hamas, instead its cowardly army has contented itself with massacring defenceless civilians, while absurdly claiming that it has no choice because Hamas supposedly hides among them as ‘human shields’. This has been the most reported and documented genocidal slaughter in history, even though Israel has murdered many journalists to try to suppress the news coming out. They have been unable to do so because of the ubiquity of social media and camera/mobile phone technology. Israel itself is not stable: there have been huge protests against Netanyahu’s overt corruption, his handling of the ‘hostage’ crisis, and the far-right nature of his regime over the last few months, even though much of it is on a chauvinist basis and does not touch the oppression of the Palestinian people. But the genocidal outrages in Gaza have given rise to the biggest worldwide protest movement in history, with many millions on the streets in countries worldwide, and billions behind them, in the Muslim world from the Maghreb to Indonesia, wider in East Asia, in Latin America, and in the imperialist countries of Western Europe and North America.

Huge Palestine Solidarity march to Israeli Embassy in London, February 2024

In some places these have led to workers’ solidarity actions, in other places, such as Yemen and now Iran, the mass solidarity of millions has had a military counterpart as armed actions have been taken against Israel by governments driven by solidarity with the Palestinians. The Houthi blockade of the Red Sea has cost Israel, and Western companies and governments who trade with Israel, many billions of dollars in lost revenue.  The prison breakout on October 7th forced Israel to evacuate many of its civilians from a wide area near Gaza. So-far sporadic hostilities with Hizbullah forces in the North have also forced large-scale evacuation of the Northern strip of Israel, near the Lebanese border. Netanyahu gambled on the attack on the Damascus Iranian consulate to escalate the war in order to hide the failures of the IDF forces in Gaza, but the result of this action appears to have forced the withdrawal of most of the IDF forces from the Gaza strip, apart from a smaller contingent that splits the strip in two and prevents those driven into the South of Gaza by the earlier bombardment and mass slaughter returning to the North.

The attack on the Damascus Embassy caused a major problem for both US imperialism, and its Biden administration on the one hand, and Israel and the Netanyahu fragile war coalition on the other. The US ruling class is divided about how to handle Iran, and that division has been evident for several years. Obama’s Iran deal, which placed limitations on Iran’s development of nuclear power technology, supposedly to stop its development of nuclear weapons, in exchange for a lifting of long-standing US sanctions, is one manifestation of this. Netanyahu and the Israel lobby played a major role in agitating in US bourgeois politics against this deal: recall Netanyahu’s address attacking Obama’s deal to a joint session of Congress in 2015 where the conduct of US politicians was described by the eminent anti-Zionist US Jewish commentator Norman Finkelstein as like “demented Jack-in-the-Boxes”.  They gave Netanyahu something like 26 standing ovations!

Trump’s far-right election campaign in 2016 was bankrolled by Likud through the gambling magnate Sheldon Adelson, who was Trump’s biggest funder. As Likud wanted, Trump tore up Obama’s Iran deal and implemented the 1995 Jerusalem Embassy Act. This had been pushed through by the Israel lobby more than 20 years earlier but kicked into the long grass by Clinton, Bush and Obama because it was irrational from the standpoint of US imperialism. He also formally recognised Israel’s annexation of Golan, the Jordan Valley, and East Jerusalem, which again previous US administrations had refrained from because they had no particular interest in doing so. The Trump administration thus gave a major boost to the power of the already-very-powerful Zionist lobby in the US. Though Trump was defeated by Biden’s Democrats in 2020, the cowardly and reactionary nature of the Democrats mean that they hardly dared challenge what Trump had done.

Though there has been a half-hearted attempt to revive Obama’s Iran deal, nothing else has changed in that regard, and Biden is still trying to shaft the Palestinians by completing Trump’s ‘Abraham Accords’ to supposedly ‘normalise’ Israeli relations with conservative Arab states like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. It is the massive exposure of the Gaza genocide and the mass rage this has generated in the whole Arab world, and wider developments such as the growth of BRICS, which Saudi Arabia and the UAE joined this year, which have made this problematic, not anything Biden has done to break with Trump’s far-right Zionism.

US Imperialism Wavers

However, the Gaza genocide and its massive exposure has caused massive political damage to the US, and the Biden administration is facing elections in the Autumn. As things stand, Biden is massively losing support from liberal and labor-inclined elements who traditionally support the Democrats, even though the way the deeply undemocratic US electoral system is designed makes it extremely difficult, in fact at present impossible, for a new political force to get on ballots to oppose both foul parties. Nevertheless, this makes the Democrats likely to lose to Trump, a mess of their own making, and that of the US ruling class, whose world imperialist hegemony is collapsing.

It is not clear whether the pullout of the bulk of Israeli troops from the Gaza Strip is the result of US pressure on Israel, or of Israeli fears of facing Iran with most of its military bogged down in a quagmire. But it is clear that this diversionary escalation tactic in fact is bringing Israeli defeat in Gaza closer because Israel does not have the resources to carry on in Gaza and take on Iran, Hizbullah, etc. Palestinians have been quoted as saying that the night Israel had to deal with Iran’s retaliatory strikes was the first night since October 7th when they have not had to contend with massive Israeli air attacks on them. It has also been reported that the single night of Iranian retaliatory strike not only was the largest drone strike in history (so far), but also cost Israel over $1 billion dollars to deal with.

 In a statement issued on the day, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, in welcoming the Iranian action, wrote that:

“…the legitimate Iranian response broke the prestige of the Zionist entity, revealing its fragility and inability to defend itself or restore its deterrence power. At the same time, it confirmed the ability of the Islamic Republic of Iran and the resistance factions to deliver painful strikes to the Zionist entity, deepening its internal crisis due to its inability to achieve any of its goals in eliminating the resistance in the Gaza Strip or stopping the strikes directed at it by the resistance in Lebanon, Yemen, and Iraq.

“…the rush of the American administration and its partners in Britain, France, Germany, and some of their Arab tails in the region to use all their defensive weapons to try to protect the Zionist entity from the Iranian missiles and drones confirms the involvement of these parties in the Zionist crimes in the region, especially in Gaza. It also reveals that this Zionist entity has suffered a strategic defeat, has become humiliated and weak, and is unable to protect itself, now imploring its allies to take on this role.

“… the unprecedented Iranian strikes, the first of their kind in history against the Zionist entity, represent an important turning point in the battle of the Al-Aqsa Flood and in favour of the resistance factions. The repercussions of this strike will have pressing effects on the Zionist entity to stop its genocidal war on the Gaza Strip after the American administration and its allies realized that any escalation in the region would lead to a regional war where their bases and interests will not be safe, nor will the Zionist entity be able to defend itself after the collapse of its deterrence power and its humiliating defeat in front of the resistance in Gaza and other fronts.

https://www.struggle-la-lucha.org/2024/04/14/pflp-unprecedented-iranian-strikes-on-israel-signal-turning-point-in-al-aqsa-battle/

The Israeli gamble on trying to provoke a regional, or world war, to negate its defeat in Gaza, may well be forlorn. The US is losing its world hegemony, and that is clear in other conflicts apart from those in West Asia. Particularly in Ukraine, where their proxy Ukrainian client is facing imminent collapse, and the strains on NATO resulting from this are such that European imperialist powers, fearing a collapse in US commitment to NATO under a Trump presidency due to isolationism, are fantasising about intervening in Ukraine on a bilateral basis, effectively outside the NATO framework. The Zionist lobby have in the past congratulated themselves in getting the US to fight its wars for it, but at this point the US seems to be somewhat paralysed. It was prepared to use its technological resources to prevent Israel’s own Iron Dome defence system being overwhelmed by a combined assault from the Axis of Resistance, but hesitates to participate in an actual Israeli attack on Iran.

And it certainly does not appear keen on the wilder ambitions for world war and the ‘Masada Complex’ that may well be harboured by Netanyahu and his even more far-right cohorts, like Smotrich or Ben Gvir, to use nuclear weapons against its opponents in West Asia, with Iran a particularly hated potential target.  It is worth noting that Scott Ritter, the former UN weapons inspector who is now a particularly enlightened commentator on geopolitics and the Russia question, has surmised that even though Iran does not possess nuclear weapons (by religious conviction, according to Ayatollah Khamenei), it nevertheless is now able to shelter under the Russian/Chinese nuclear umbrella by virtue of its membership of the Shanghai Cooperation Council, and equally importantly, its provision of drone technology to Russia for use in defending the Donbass.  This may well blunt the temptation for the US to act on Israel’s behalf against Iran even more. It is still possible that Israel’s nuclear arsenal may be used in such a conflict, but if so, they really could not expect impunity either.

There appears to have been a considerable exodus from Israel by parts of the Jewish population who have lost confidence in the stability and ability to prevail of Israel against the native people of the Levant. The October 7th action by Hamas was a huge defeat for Israel, not in strictly military terms, as they regained control of ‘their’ territory within a few days and forced the insurgents to flee back to the Gaza Strip. But it was a political defeat, as the division between Gaza and the adjacent areas of Israel is artificial and purely a product of ethnic cleaning and previous atrocities and massacres of the Arab civilian population. The vaunted stability of the Zionist colonisation was exposed as being built on sand. The only solution that the Zionists could envisage for that political problem was a genocidal one – the extermination of the ‘uppity’ population that had dared to defy the place allocated to it by the colonisers.

But that in turn has exposed the nature of Zionism to the whole world, and irrevocably destroyed its political reputation. The only justification that the Jewish-Zionist bourgeoisie and its camp followers were able to propagate for the increasingly visible crimes of their state was that Israel was in some way an atonement for the Nazi genocide of Jews. The element of racist injustice that Arabs, entirely outside the European continent where the genocide took place, should have to supposedly pay for the crimes of Europeans against the mainly Ashkenazi European Jewish population, was passed over in silence by the same Jewish-Zionist bourgeoisie and its European and North American camp followers and cult worshippers, in the last three quarters of a century or so. But the decisive exposure of the genocidal nature of the Zionist project by the Gaza genocide witnessed by the world over the last 6th months is an irrevocable defeat. Never again, as the perpetrator of genocide itself, will it be able to trade on the bastardisastion of the Nazi genocide to excuse its crimes. That ship has sailed. The developing exodus of Jewish colonists from Israel could well, as Ritter has pointed out, point to a coming collapse of the settler entity as to make the democratic demand for a single polity based on full political equality, a democratic demand capable of being implemented in practice.

A major defeat for Zionism and Western imperialism, particularly US imperialism, is taking shape. However, the strategic goals of these forces have not changed, and the working class needs to be on its guard for further reckless and destructive actions from these forces, and above all to struggle for the full liberation of the Palestinian people from Zionist genocidal oppression.

Defeat Zionism. Defend Iran and the Axis of Resistance from Lebanon to Iraq to Yemen. Destroy the Zionist State – for full equality and democratic rights for all in a workers Palestine. For permanent revolution across West Asia – for working class power!

US/British/French/EU imperialists – out of West Asia!