On August 28, Israel’s genocidal rulers launched their biggest military raid of the occupied West Bank in more than twenty years. One week later, the Zionist stormtroopers have slaughtered more than thirty Palestinians in Jenin—a longtime flashpoint for anti-apartheid resistance—and other refugee camps. Roads and hospitals are devastated; families are cut off from electricity, water, sewage systems, and the internet. Amid mass evacuation orders, thousands have fled their homes. Since Israel laid siege to Gaza last October, the West Bank death toll stands at close to 700—most killed by Israel’s military, others by racist Zionist settlers stealing all the land they can (news4jax.com, 9/4).
Israel’s bosses say they’re moving against “terrorists” and to block smuggled weapons from U.S. enemy Iran, a claim rejected by a top UN official. “I see a serious…parallel with what is happening on the Gaza Strip,” said Francesca Albanese, the Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, “patterns of torture, of destruction, of extrajudicial killings, of uprooting” (msn.com, 9/1). Meanwhile, Joe Biden and his partner in war crime, Kamala Harris, keep pouring arms into the Zionists’ bloodstained hands, including a $20 billion package approved last month. As the Benjamin Netanyahu regime escalates its state terror against children and workers in Palestine, total fatalities—including those killed by war-related disease—are nearing 200,000 (thelancet.com, 7/10), or more than 8 percent of Palestine’s prewar population. Harris’s shameless support for Israel’s “right to defend itself” is a prescription for unchecked baby-killing and a generation of orphans.
At the same time, the threat of all-out conflict in the Middle East keeps growing. Competition to control the oil-rich region could easily lead to a nuclear conflagration and the next world war, with the U.S. and Europe on one side and China and Russia on the other. Millions of workers would be misled and coerced into killing their class sisters and brothers, all for one set of capitalist parasites or another.
Nationalism—including the Israeli nationalism known as Zionism—is toxic for the international working class. It divides workers while promoting false unity between workers and capitalist bosses. Nation states are instruments of racism, anti-immigrant violence, imperialist war, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. We must support the brave workers of Palestine/Israel and their heroic fightback against the Zionist/U.S. death machine.But as we’ve seen in so many courageous struggles of the past, from Vietnam and Indonesia to South Africa and Haiti, the antidote to nationalist poison can’t be national liberation. It can’t be the dead-end nationalism of Hamas and its self-serving capitalist leadership. The only cure is communist revolution, the violent overthrow of the profit system and the birth of a society run by and for the working class. Progressive Labor Party is committed to leading the working class to deliver that communist cure worldwide. Join us!
West Bank history of fightback
For nearly three million Palestinians, the West Bank is an open-air prison that they can neither leave nor securely call their home. Squeezed between Israel and Jordan on the west bank of the Jordan River, they are the surviving refugees and descendants of the Nakba of 1948, when the British and U.S. imperialists created the Israeli nation—and spurred the violent displacement of the Arab population that had lived and worked for centuries within the new country’s borders. Since the Six-Day War of 1967, workers in the West Bank have been brutalized and oppressed by Israel’s military occupation and the corrupt sell-outs who head the Palestinian Authority. To tighten their control, Israel’s bosses encouraged Zionist settlers to seize the homes and fields of Palestinian families. Today, nearly 700,000 settlers live in heavily guarded, suburban-style neighborhoods. Their utilities and schools are provided by the Israeli government. They have Zionist-only malls and supermarkets and Zionist-only roads that cut off Palestinians from water sources, relatives, friends, and former neighbors. The settlers vote in Israeli elections and are protected on their stolen land by Israeli soldiers armed to the teeth (Chris Hedges, Substack, 7/12).
The Zionists have carved up and walled off so much of the West Bank that the “two-state solution,” the magical policy embraced by lying snakes Biden and Harris, is a physical and political impossibility. For Netanyahu’s Likud Party, there can be only one state—a Zionist state. According to Likud’s coalition dealt with the open nazis of the ultra-nationalist Religious Zionism party, “the Jewish people have the exclusive and indisputable right to all parts of the Land of Israel,” including “Judea and Samaria,” the biblical term for the West Bank (The Times of Israel, 12/28/22). Members of Netanyahu’s government are now openly plotting to annex the area (New York Times, 8/28).
The current fightback by Palestinians in the West Bank has a long history. In Jenin in the 1930’s and ‘40’s, before the partitioning of Palestine into Israel and Jordan, workers rebelled against the British colonizers. In the early 2000s, young workers in Jenin, many of them teenagers, led the Second Intifada, an uprising against the Israeli occupation. In 2002, a ten-day battle—longer than Israel’s 1967 war against Egypt, Syria, and Jordan—killed 23 Israeli soldiers and 52 Palestinians (NY Times 8/28).
The Palestinians’ fightback continues today, against huge odds, and has inspired workers worldwide. As we witness the Zionist bosses’ atrocities with horror and rage, tens of thousands have come out to protest in solidarity with their class sisters and brothers. The looming global imperialist clash presents a great danger for all workers—but also a great opportunity as horror turns into consciousness and rage into insurrection. Our Party must be prepared to lead our class to revolution in the midst of war. However dark the horizon may seem, the future is red for the international working class.
Fight for communism!
For now, we workers must fight against the genocide of workers living under apartheid in Palestine. We must do all we can to build international support for those under mortal attack in the West Bank and Gaza. Harris and Trump represent different camps of capitalists, and so they have their disagreements. But when it comes to backing the despicable Israeli bosses, they have no real disagreement. Workers must not be trapped by the vague hope for a ceasefire in Palestine, or the myth of a “lesser evil” in this fall’s U.S. elections. In the name of capitalist profit, both Democrats and Republicans plan to massacre many more workers in the Middle East—and, as war spreads and fascism rises, many millions around the globe. As Kamala Harris blustered in her acceptance speech at the Democrats’ convention, “I will ensure America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world.” As the potential next leader of the nation that wreaked the atomic holocausts in Japan and a genocide in Southeast Asia, she should be taken at her word.
But there’s an alternative to the bosses’ failing liberal democracy and its cynical, deadly choices: a revolutionary communist party. We must organize the working class not to build two states, or one state, but to smash all states in our fight for international communist revolution.
