US Elections – Vote PSL, No Votes for Harris or Trump. United Front Action to oppose any Far-Right Putsch!

Joint Statement of LCFI and ClassConscious.org

As Marxists, we can never give support to outright bourgeois, imperialist parties like the Democrats and Republicans in the United States. This is certainly true in the current US election to take place on November 5^th, when the fascist-Republican Donald Trump squares off against the Democratic Party nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris. Both parties represent different factions of the bourgeoisie, both pitch for support from different sections of the working class. The purpose being to chain those sections of the masses to thoroughly bourgeois politics, and in Trump’s case, to try to mobilise the most backward elements to try to bludgeon his way back to power irrespective of the popular vote of the US American people.

We seek to find a way to draw a class line in this election against the imperialist parties, who are up to their necks in support to Israel’s genocidal campaign to destroy the Palestinian people, which is now spreading genocidal Zionist terrorism and massacres of civilians throughout the West Asia/Middle East region. The Biden administration is also up to its neck in the US proxy war in Ukraine, as part of a new Cold War against Russia and China, non-imperialist adversaries that have put themselves at the head of a bloc of ex-colonial countries, workers states and former workers states resisting imperialist hegemony.

We call upon all socialists, anti-racists and class-conscious workers to vote for the ticket of the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), and its Presidential and Vice-Presidential candidates, Claudia De la Cruz and Karina Garcia. Though there is much in the campaign of the PSL that represents left-liberal sentiment – in particular their material on Ukraine is weak – nevertheless by counterposing a socialist campaign to the two main bourgeois parties, they are drawing a class line in this election in an elemental manner. In quite a few places, the bourgeois parties, particularly the Democrats, are trying hard to marginalise them by keeping them off the ballot.

PSL Candiates Claudia De la Cruz and Karina Garcia, and a guide to how to vote for them for US readers. See https://votesocialist2024.com/ for more information.

Such basic class politics is particularly crucial today, as US bourgeois politics has reached a stage of decay so deep that it seems likely that the outcome of this election could bring about something close to civil war, and the Trump/Republican side openly threatens both bourgeois and left-wing political opponents with imprisonment, violence, and the use of the US military to crush the so-called ‘enemy within’.

Trump can only move forward with this threat of a coup d’état and second American civil war, and this time go beyond his 2021 Beer Hall Putsch if Trumpism manages to divide the national repressive apparatus and the ‘deep state’: Pentagon, National Guard, CIA, FBI, making them bear the cost of war. Without this, Trump does not have the military strength and intelligence to even start a civil war or consistently blackmail the Democrats.

Trump’s rise to office for his first term from 2016 to 2020 was fuelled in large measure by popular disillusionment with neoliberal politics and economics, privatisation, deregulation and attacks on the living standards of the working class. The decline of US manufacturing industry, parallelling what happened in Britain and other places, was part of the neoliberal strategy of engineering the decline of the working class at home through the export of unionised, decent-paying jobs to lower wage countries in the Global Rest, including China. Over time, this undermined support from such unionised workers for the Democrats and produced Trumpism, which mobilised angry sections of increasingly impoverished, under-employed workers behind Trump’s call to ‘Make America Great Again’.

Many of Trump’s working-class supporters in 2016 were under the illusion that he was on their side against such things. His racism and anti-Muslim vitriol and abuses, and rampant support for Zionists (who provided him with many millions of dollars of funding), was used to fuel a nationalist protectionism and the illusion that his anti-immigration brutality and chauvinist hostility to China, his racist contempt for blacks and his hatred of the Black Lives Matter movement went hand-in-hand with a programme to revive US manufacturing, that this was the real concept behind ‘MAGA’ (“Make America Great Again”).

There is also the illusion that Trump was in some way anti-war, even that he was supported by Putin’s Russia, which has fuelled illusions among some anti-imperialist activists. The liberals “Russiagate” delusion was an effort to use the factional split in the US ruling class to further whip up war hysteria against Russia by casting Trump as a tool of the “all powerful Putin”. The Democrats represent the faction of the US ruling class who wanted to crush Russia first before moving onto war with China. It was also an act of projection to divert attention from Trump being fully backed by Zionist forces rather than Russia.

Trump was far from pro-worker: virtually the first thing he did when he took office in January 2017 was to institute a massive tax-cut, mainly for the very rich. His far-right appointments to the Supreme Court did what they were meant to do – they abolished a woman’s right to abortion on a federal level, giving every backward state the right to deny basic rights to women.

And far from being a peacemaker in power, one of his most virulent, warmongering actions was that in 2019 he tore up the Reagan-Gorbachev Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty of 1987, that resulted in the removal of Cruise and Pershing Missiles from Europe, that in the1980s were a potent threat of nuclear first-strike against the USSR. His anti-Russian warmongering was of such intensity that his first Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, was so outraged and frightened by his intensity, that he notoriously lost his temper and called Trump a ‘fucking moron’. Trump also personally ordered the murder of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps Qasem Soleimani in January 2020, a notorious act of war against Iran. The went together with Trump’s tearing up of Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran, which is what he was paid to do by the Likudnik casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson. He did much else for the Zionists – he moved the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, and recognised Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights from Syria. This laid the basis for overt US support to the current genocide – all such capitulations and favours to Israel then put the lobby in a stronger position over the next President to continue them, which Biden duly did.

And while there may be illusions about Trump supposedly being set to stop US support for Ukraine, it should be recalled that it was under Trump’s presidency that Zelensky was groomed as Jewish camouflage for the Nazi-dominated US puppet regime that has waged a proxy war against the people of the Donbass and Crimea on behalf of the US and NATO. In February 2022 this became a proxy war against Russia itself, as Russia intervened in the East of Ukraine to protect the people of the Donbass from a massive US-funded offensive that began 10 days before Putin finally kicked off the Special Military Operation.

Harris appears like a younger copy of Biden. Her early history as a reactionary District Attorney and then Attorney General in California put her on the same wing of the Democratic Party as Bill Clinton and Biden, with their ‘Effective Death Penalty’ Act that tried to out-Reagan the Republican Party themselves. In California she could not be as virulent as that, but she both professed to oppose, and enforced, the Death Penalty as Attorney General. She was notorious for seeking to keep imprisoned men, many of whom were black, in jail even beyond nominal release dates, to engage in prison work, which caused her to be strongly disliked among many black people, even now as she poses a champion of the rights of minorities against Trump’s overt racism. She has slightly distanced herself from Netanyahu’s most bloodthirsty actions during the current genocidal rampage against Palestinians in Gaza and elsewhere, calling sporadically for ceasefires etc, but the murder of Hassan Nasrallah, the Israeli attempt to invade Lebanon, the recent Israeli attack on Iran, etc have had her leaping to attention, seeking the approval of the Lobby.

Harris is not a lesser evil in electoral terms. Judging by the opinion polls, she still has the edge in terms of the likely popular vote, but that is not always what decides US presidential elections. Rather, it is the fate of around 7 swing states that often decide, and if those go the opposite way to the popular vote, they can still provide the second placed candidate overall with enough votes in the state-by-state Electoral College to win the presidency, even against the popular vote. Both Trump in 2016, and George W Bush in 2000, won the presidency against the popular vote.

This is what Trump is hoping will happen again. It happened in 2016, and when it failed to happen again in 2020, he launched his ‘Beer Halll Putsch’ – the 6 Jan attack on the Capitol. It is highly likely that something similar will happen if Harris manages to win the popular vote, and some of the swing states become violently contested – there will likely be an attempt by Trump and his supporters to seize the presidency by forcibly seizing control of the Electoral College, hoping no doubt that his appointed Supreme Court judges will back him up. One factor against that is that the same judges have ruled that the President is effectively above the law, immune from prosecution “In his/Her official capacity”, and being as Trump is not the incumbent, the Biden-Harris administration could use that as a license to act ruthlessly in putting down a renewed Trump putsch. But that could in turn trigger the outbreak of civil war.

Though the workers movement has no interest in supporting either bourgeois candidate in this election, but rather an interest in supporting the independent PSL, nevertheless if there is an attempt to negate formal democracy, we do have a class interest in defeating that. So, there would be a principled ground, and class imperative, for a united front with Harris and the Democrats against such a Trump putsch. A defence of the right of the elected president to take office is in the interest of the working class as a matter of elementary self-defence, particularly as Trump has openly stated his intention to use the US military to suppress and take revenge against liberal and left-wing political opponents.

This is not a minor question – it may loom very large after 5^th November. But at the same time, our interest is in the maximum class-based vote for the PSL.

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.

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 19^th/early 20^th 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, 14^th 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 1^st 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 7^th 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 7^th 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 7^th 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 7^th 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 7^th 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 6^th 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!