As American bombs began falling on Iraq, Obama shedding crocodile tears, declared that he cannot stand by while the lives of children are threatened by ISIS: “When we face a situation like we do on that mountain — with innocent people facing the prospect of violence on a horrific scale,…when we have the unique capabilities to help avert a massacre, then I believe the United States of America cannot turn a blind eye.” He was referring to 10-40,000 Yazidis, a religious minority, driven from their homes in northern Iraq. Of course, he had no remorse for the slaughter of 2,000 (and counting) Gazans over the past month, including about 450 children, and instead armed their Israeli murderers. And when U.S. sanctions led to the death of an estimated half million children in Iraq prior to 2003, then Secretary of State Madeline Albright under President Clinton said, “We think the price is worth it.”
The Israelis and their U.S. backers justify the slaughter of innocents by blaming Hamas for using civilians as human shields. Of course, the 1.8 million residents in Gaza have no place to run. The entire area is about the size of Manhattan, and 44 percent of that has been made a no-go zone by Israel. Whether armed resistance is a good tactic or not, Hamas has no place to go that is not near civilians. Israel, which has precise U.S.-supplied weapons capable of focusing on single individuals, has chosen to destroy a third of Gazan hospitals, 144 schools (many sheltering refugees), a home for the disabled, the only power water/sewage plant, and has displaced 25 percent of the people. Clearly the wholesale massacre and intimidation of workers in Gaza is their strategy, with the “transfer” of as many Palestinians by rapid or slow death as their goal.
The utter hypocrisy of the Israelis is made clear when one examines their history. Before the establishment of the state of Israel, when Zionist Jews were fighting against the British colonialists and the local Arabs, they used all the “terrorist” tactics they now decry — the tactics of the weaker party. In 1946, the Irgun (a Jewish paramilitary group) blew up the King David Hotel which housed the British administrative offices, killing 91 people. The leader of the attack, Menachim Begin, later became Prime Minister. In that same year, Tel Aviv’s largest synagogue was used to store weapons, and a plaque is displayed there today to memorialize this action (see photo). The leader of that group, the Stern Gang, was Yitzhak Shamir, who served two terms as Prime Minister in the ‘80s.
During the Israeli war on Lebanon in the 1980s, the Israelis approved the attack on the Sabra and Shatila camps for Palestinian and Lebanese Shiite refugees, which killed 1,800 to 3,500, mostly women and children. Ariel Sharon, the military leader at the time, also became Prime Minister.
We must however not fall into the trap of siding with the weaker parties as conflicts rage in the world today. Though besieged on every side, Hamas does not rule in the interests of workers in Gaza. Elected in 2006 over the corrupt Fatah party that runs the West Bank, Hamas had to fight Fatah to take power. Since then they have not been able to institute their ultimate goal of fundamentalist Islamic rule, but they have increased inequality and corruption in their besieged territory.
No opposition groups are allowed to protest or meet openly, and their members are frequently arrested; no opposition press exists. Imports of goods through tunnels, nearly everything necessary for life, is heavily taxed, as are all licenses, permits and administrative functions, which has allowed Hamas leaders to live at a much higher standard than others. In a place with near 50 percent unemployment, all government and associated jobs go only to Hamas supporters. If the situation permits, they would like to severely curtail the rights of women and insert conservative Islam into all areas of life.
All capitalist rulers, be they secular or fundamentalist, superpower or colonized state, aim to enrich themselves at the expense of workers. The large powers, the U.S., Russia, and China, are fighting over control of the resources of the world — oil, gas and minerals. Their smaller proxies, like Saudi Arabia and Iran, are competing to sell their resources to the highest bidder. Proxy wars are raging in Syria, Palestine, Ukraine, Iraq and Afghanistan, but we workers have nothing to gain no matter who the victors are. We are only deceiving ourselves if we think that the rulers of the weaker parties, be they ISIS, Hamas or the Ukrainians, have any more interest in the well-being of their own workers than do the rulers of the larger powers. Like the U.S. bosses, they all lie about their own humanity while vilifying their competitors, but they are all mass murderers. They are fighting for the oil of northern Iraq, the gas under Gaza, the pipelines of Ukraine — not to save any children.
Our job is to fight for international unity of all workers and to defeat nationalism and patriotism, which try to lure us into support of one exploitative leader or another. Together we must build a society where all workers share the world’s resources in order to provide the best possible lives for all and where racism, sexism and nationalism are forbidden. That society is a communist one.