The cease fire between Israel and the Hamas Palestinian government in Gaza after 11 days of bombardment is the result of a major failure of Israel in the face of multiple facets of resistance to Netanyahu’s deliberate provocation of this phase of the Zionist war against the Palestinians. The ceasefire was conceded very reluctantly, and no sooner it had taken effect than the Israelis launched another provocation at Al Aqsa, but the public climb down was still significant and allowed the leaders of Hamas in Gaza to claim a victory.
It is a significant victory for the Palestinians against Netanyahu, despite the death of over 200 Palestinians, half of them women and children, and the destruction of numerous buildings, homes, and infrastructure. Israeli casualties from the Palestinian fire were, as is normal, tiny. The Israeli barbarism extended to the destruction of Gaza’s only Covid testing centre, the blowing up of high-rise residential blocks, rendering many homeless, and the destruction of a building housing the international press, from Al Jazeera to Associated Press, simply to stop accurate reporting of Israel’s massacres. Netanyahu had intended to resolve the impasse of his three-times failure to form a stable government coalition after three indecisive elections, and the threat of jail for corruption hanging over him, by flattening Gaza, and a new victorious ethnic cleansing of Al Quds/Jerusalem, even the destruction of Al Aqsa.
Israel is the most enduring and main dictatorship of imperialism over the oppressed peoples of all Asia
Imperialism and Zionism are hegemonic controllers of the world media and bourgeois public opinion. With this propaganda power, they sell the ideological myth that Israel is the only and true democracy in the Middle East. But in this confrontation Israel was unmasked and once again it is proved that in fact Israel is the most enduring and main dictatorship of imperialism over the oppressed peoples of all Asia, even when compared to the worst dictatorships such as those in Indonesia and Myanmar. Recently, this same Zionist imperialist media, at the service of the campaign in favor of Netanyahu, presented Israel as one of the countries that best conducted the fight against the pandemic, even vaccinating more than half of the Israeli population. Here, too, the condemnation of the Nazi-Zionist state is reinforced by the discovery of the increase in the Palestinian holocaust during Israel’s vaccination campaign, which was based on the denial of the Palestinian right to defend itself against the covid, with only 4.2% of Palestinians have been fully vaccinated so far.
The unconditional ceasefire was the result primarily of the resistance of the Palestinians, and particularly of that of the population of the Gaza strip, whose militant defenders fired hundreds of home-made rockets, hitting parts of Israel they had previously been unable to reach. Even though the damage from these home-made weapons was light as they do not have the billions of dollars of military technology and weaponry that Israel has, it was still a crucial act of solidarity with the victims of ethnic cleansing in Sheikh Jarrar, and against the outrageous communalist attack on the Al Aqsa Mosque, the third holiest site to billions of Muslims around the world, whose destruction and replacement with a ‘third temple’ is one the key goals of the Zionist right, who are now dominant in Israel under Netanyahu.
But even more shocking from the point of view of the Israeli ruling class was the unified General Strike of Palestinian workers across the West Bank, Gaza, and Israel ‘proper’ within the ‘Green Line’ (the 1948 ceasefire borders). The Palestinian population within Israel, those who escaped the 1948 Nakba and were not expelled (but spent decades under military rule, and then as second-class non-Jewish citizens of a Jewish state), acted in solidarity with their Palestinian brethren right across occupied Palestine between the Jordan and the Mediterranean, underling that despite the Zionist fiction that designates this population as “Israeli Arabs”, they are Palestinians, part of the dispossessed Palestinian nation, and part of a integral Palestinian working class and oppressed population despite the division of his population by borders, checkpoints, separation walls and the Gaza fence. This section of the Palestinian population also fought back hard in mixed Israeli cities such as Lod/Lydda.
Palestine is one nation from the River to the Sea, and the Palestinian working class has considerable power, beyond its formal industrial muscle, which is limited as Israel limits its exposure to Arab labour with the long-term aim of dispensing with it. The political impact of such an act of the proletarian and oppressed masses is what frightened the Israeli ruling class into cutting their losses in this situation and accepting a ceasefire that only days earlier they had ridiculed. This recalls the words of Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto of 1947 when they wrote that:
“Now and then the workers are victorious, but only for a time. The real fruit of their battles lies, not in the immediate result, but in the ever-expanding union of the workers. This union is helped on by the improved means of communication that are created by modern industry, and that place the workers of different localities in contact with one another.”
In other words, the potential of such a political strike action is in its ability to inspire further such actions, to create and expand a movement around itself, and to thus shake the stability of bourgeois rule itself. It has the potential to inspire other sections of the masses ground down by Zionism and its imperialist supporters around the world, and to endanger the precious ‘stability’ of Israel itself, which still uses its significant Palestinian minority as a fig-leaf to try to disguise the ethnocratic nature of the state. Not only that, but it is capable of inspiring international solidarity actions that further strengthen it. The actions of Italian port workers in refusing to load arms shipments for Israel, and South African dock workers in boycotting Israeli cargo in solidarity with the Palestinians are examples of the huge potential for international workers’ solidarity over this issue and no doubt played a major role in this Israeli setback.
It is no doubt this potential for radicalisation of the struggle that produced the volte-face not only from Israel, but from Biden, who though his Trump appointee and fanatical Zionist UN Ambassador, Nikki Haley, had defied earlier pressure particularly from China, Russia and eventually even France in the UN Security Council and vetoed draft resolutions calling for a ceasefire. Yet suddenly the weaselly US calls for ‘de-escalation’, while insisting on Israel’s supposed ‘right’ to defend itself against its victims, appeared to produce a ceasefire. Evidently it was the resistance that caused this, not anything Biden did.
However, the outspoken statements of Turkish leader Erdoğan and particularly Russia’s Putin, threatening unspecified reprisals against Israel for its blatant killings of civilians, may well have added pressure. In addition, the radicalisation of the Palestinian struggle and the increasing exposure of Israel’s crimes has produced something of a schism in the US Democratic Party, with Biden’s overt support for Israel during this attack coming under fire from what seems to be a growing, more radical layer, from Bernie Sanders to the ‘Squad’ of Black, Palestinian/Muslim, and Hispanic members in the House of Representatives, but not confined to them.
The contradictions involving this layer are potentially quite explosive, as the Israel lobby is not marginal but embedded in very powerful positions within the US ruling class and overlaps with the Israeli ruling class itself through dual citizenship and material investments in many cases. The Zionist lobby is likely to strike back hard through AIPAC, as indeed they already have tried to do, and that could produce a very bitter conflict within US bourgeois politics as Sanders and the Squad now have a considerable social and electoral base among partially radicalised layers of the US working class and oppressed. It could produce something like the confrontation with Corbyn’s supporters in Britain.
This confrontation between Israel and the Palestinians has produced a much larger movement of support around the world, with demonstrations of hundred of thousands in some places despite the pandemic. This needs to be built and strengthened much further into a movement that can generate much more powerful, class struggle actions and interact with the liberation movement within occupied Palestine and the wider Middle East region. To deepen the potential that evidently exists for working class struggles to radicalise, regionalise, and internationalise, pointing to the perspective of Permanent Revolution, the force of the primarily Arab proletariat that can crack Israel though placing itself at the head of the struggle of all the oppressed, for a multi-ethnic workers state in Palestine as part of a region-wide revolutionary struggle, with a world-revolutionary perspective.
● For the end of the Zionist Nazi state and for the extinction of the colonies expanding this imperialist policy!
● For a Multi-ethnic and multi religious Workers’ State of Palestine in a Socialist Federation of the Middle East of Workers’ Councils!
● For the international political strike and For Workers Sanctions against Israel!
● Unconditional Defence of Hamas against the Zionist state!
● For the military victory of the anti-imperialist guerrilla organizations Hamas and Hezbollah in Palestine, Lebanon and Syria!
