AL-ARAKIB, ISRAEL-PALESTINE, July 27 — Hundreds of workers, both Bedouin-Arabs and Jews, marched against the Jewish National Fund’s (JNF) attempt to evict the Bedouin village of al-Arakib from its ancestral lands. In the last two years, this village has been demolished no less than 40 times. Yet the villagers, impoverished workers and peasants, still cling to their land and rebuild again and again, bravely defying the will of the racist Israeli regime.

Workers from all parts of Israel-Palestine stand in solidarity with this struggle, encouraging the villagers of al-Arakib in their fight for a piece of land to call their home. But what is this struggle really about? For this, we must look at the history of the Bedouins in Palestine.

Before the 1948 war, 90,000 Bedouins lived in the Negev (southern Israel-Palestine), mostly settling down as pastoral peasants in the early 20th century. When the Zionist movement took power and established the State of Israel, 59,000 of them were deported, mostly to the Sinai peninsula and the Gaza Strip. The rest were kept under martial law in the “Siag” region, essentially a tiny native reservation (or ghetto) until 1966. Then they were allowed more freedom, but were still confined to a small part of the land. Currently, the Bedouins, some of whom were living in the Negev for centuries if not millennia, make up only 25% of the Negev’s population; the remaining 75% are Jews brought by the Israeli government after 1948.

How Israeli Rulers Cheat Bedoiuns 

The Israeli government claims almost all of the Negev as its own state land. Bedouins who live on state land — even if it was their family’s ancestral land for centuries — are considered to be “squatters.” Since the 1970’s, the Israeli government “generously” allowed the Bedouins to “sell” parts of their claimed lands to the state for ridiculously low prices, usually around 25-30% of the land’s market value.

Understandably, most Bedouin workers and peasants were very reluctant to give up their lands, especially for such an unfair price. So most remaining Bedouin settlements are technically illegal — that is, the government and the Zionist JNF can demolish their homes and evict them legally. These “unrecognized” villages, such as al-Arakib, are not allowed to receive electricity or running water from the state infrastructure, and have to improvise amenities. Sometimes their children have to walk for many kilometers to get to school.

Since the late 1960’s, Israel has built “planned” settlement towns,  essentially ghettos, for the Bedouins. In these towns, the largest of which is Rahat (population 50,000), there are almost no jobs, and the residents have to make do with minimal infrastructure and under-funded health and education services. Unemployment in Rahat, for example, is upwards of 50% for men and 85% for women with 60% of households below the poverty line. This poverty breeds crime and drug use.

This is the main reason why half the Bedouin population chooses to stay in “unrecognized” villages with no modern amenities and engage in subsistence farming (usually herding sheep) rather than move to the poverty-stricken “planned” towns where no jobs can be found.

Real Estate Bosses Profit from Racism

The policy of the Zionist movement (and its creation, the State of Israel) places more Jews on more land and less Arabs on less land.

This racist policy is heaven for real-estate capitalists all over the Western world, particularly the U.S. It is hell for the Arab working class, as well as the Jewish working class which was settled in underfunded “development towns” providing cheap labor for local capitalist factories heavily subsidized by the government from the 1950’s to the 1980’s. In the 1980’s and 1990’s, most of these factories were shut down or moved to the Far East, leaving the entire towns stricken with mass unemployment.

Meanwhile, the Israeli government and the JNF keep planning and building gated communities for wealthy Jews in the Negev, all while claiming that the Bedouins — who were already there long before the state was founded — are “stealing land” from the state.

Al-Arakib, an unrecognized Bedouin village near Rahat and Beersheba, is home to several working-class families. In the past, they engaged in subsistence agriculture to supplement their meager income. In the summer of 2010, however, their village was demolished. The government uprooted their olive trees and destroyed their homes. Since then, the regime has demolished this village 40 times. The locals still fight back, with the help of working-class activists. This struggle is not only for the village of al-Arakib, but for the fate of 100,000 Bedouin workers and peasants who live in “unrecognized” villages. If al-Arakib falls, the racist Israeli regime will move on to demolish many more villages to make room for real-estate development for the profits of U.S. and Israeli bosses.

The only answer to this racist attack on workers and peasants is to fight back, and the villagers at al-Arakib are fighting courageously. However, the only way to ensure a better life for all parts of the working class is to get rid of the root of all evil — capitalism and its creation, nationalism — and replace them by a multi-ethnic communist world ruled by the working class as a whole. Such a communist society will provide real infrastructure and livelihood to all workers. The Progressive Labor Party fights for a communist Israel-Palestine and a borderless communist world. Join us!

Red Bread, by Maurice Hindus, was written in 1931 about the collectivization of the farms in the Soviet Union (USSR). Hindus was a U.S. citizen who was born and raised in a small village in the USSR and was visiting his home and writing about the people there.

In one chapter, a “New Girl,” Vera was introduced to Hindus by her superior on the collective farm (kolhoz) as a real daughter of the revolution. Her formal job title was as a milk maid — charged with milking eight cows, three times a day. 

Her real job started after her milking duties were finished. She was only 18 years old but her station and responsibilities made her appear more mature and a bit older. She was also the secretary of the kolhoz.  She was a talented organizer and passionate orator who gave lectures on the benefits of the kolhoz and also on the latest farming techniques. 

According to Hindus, the Russian peasantry at this time were living in unimaginable poverty and squalor. Moving to the kolhoz was a big improvement. Yet some resisted. The kolhoz  grew from 10 Jewish families a few years before to an international kolhoz,  with Poles, Letts, Lithuanians and Russians. One of Vera’s responsibilities was to settle disputes and promote collectivity among the workers from various backgrounds. 

Vera’s many duties and chores kept her very busy. Still she was a vibrant and inquisitive young woman. She wanted to know many things about the U.S. and especially about U.S. girls. She wanted to know their interests, what what they wore, what books they liked to read, if they have talking motion pictures. Hindus tried to answer all her questions which usually only led to a barrage of more questions.

Vera was very impressed with U.S. technology and advancements in manufacturing and agriculture. But she felt they were grossly underdeveloped in culture. The manufacturing was advanced in that it could furnish the workers with more than one pair of shoes. Yet U.S. workers were lagging behind the Soviets because capitalist exploitation destroyed their lives. 

Vera was a dedicated communist who was convinced that workers would soon overthrow the capitalist system in the U.S. Mainly she thought that capitalism had outlived its usefulness.

Hindus told Vera that the middle class in the U.S. would thwart any attempts at revolution, but Hindus failed to tell Vera that in the 1930s workers and the Communist Party in the U.S were organizing and fighting against capitalist oppression in basic industries, such as textiles, steel, mining and auto.

Even though the manufacturers were producing plenty of clothes and shoes, many workers were not paid enough to buy back what they produced; the same dilemma workers face today worldwide.

Overall Red Bread takes a positive look at the collectivization of farms in the Soviet Union. And the chapter on the New Girl takes a good look at the new international woman.

Three thousand police march like Nazi storm troopers through a downtown metropolis to do battle with hundreds of rebels on the steps of city hall. Sounds like NYPD’s response to the Occupy Wall Street protests or the response of the Anaheim police to the anger at their latest racist killings? Try the latest movie in the Batman trilogy, Dark Knight Rises. In this film, the Dark Knight (Batman) must “rise” to the challenge of greater threats to the capitalist system as he leads thousands of Gotham police to fight armed rebels who have occupied the city. 

While previous villains like the Joker wanted to watch the world burn for fun, Batman’s newest foe, Bane, is committed to destroying Gotham because of a strict political ideology. For Bane, the decadent rich, corrupt kkkops and politicians have ruined the city and the only thing left to do is to blow it all up and start over.

In fact, Dark Knight Rises does not hide from the fact that a society ruled by the wealthy is unpleasant, full of poverty and crime and the petty rivalries of modern aristocrats jockeying for position. As Bruce Wayne dances at a high society ball with Catwoman, a thief from Old Town, she threatens him, stating that “a storm is coming” and asking how the wealthy ever “thought they could live so large leaving so little for the rest of us.” 

Perverting Revolution

As director Christopher Nolan soon makes clear, this situation, where the rich take everything and leave nothing for workers, is preferable to the prospect of workers taking over.  Instead of portraying him as a potential revolutionary hero, a leader of a party committed to organizing the workers of Gotham, Nolan’s Bane combines Al Qaeda-style terrorism with the revolutionary language of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Falsely equating communism with terrorism appears to be one of the key manifestations of anti-communism in the 21st century. 

After obtaining a nuclear weapon and trapping thousands of Gotham police underground, Bane implements his plan: The “innocent” and elderly rich are thrown out of their homes and into the streets. “Peoples’ courts” run by a psychotic madman sentence “good” and “bad” capitalists alike who are summarily executed.  He frees all of Gotham’s prisoners who have been incarcerated by the Dent Act. It’s a policy reminiscent of New York’s racist Stop-and-Frisk, which has harrassed 700,000 youth and workers in 2011.

While workers hide in their homes, the terror wreaked by Bane and his army of escaped convicts is presented as a natural outcome of revolutions.  The film transforms the fascist Gotham police into “freedom fighters” who go underground and organize against Bane’s “revolutionary” terror.

Distorts Communist Justice

Bane’s “people’s revolution,” however, has nothing to do with Gotham’s working class and draws heavily from a long history of anti-communist propaganda. The film’s version of “people’s courts” grossly perverts the true history of public trials like the ones held in the countryside in revolutionary China, where landlords were justly held accountable for their crimes against the peasantry. And Bane’s top-down “revolution” plays on the age-old anti-communist lie that revolutions are forced onto people and inherently lead to corruption, strongman dictatorships and anarchy. The true history — that millions in revolutionary Russia and China were won to fight for communist revolution — is obscured by Bane’s caricature.

The overarching message of the film is clear: revolutionary alternatives to capitalism are worse than the current system. According to the film, workers are essentially irrelevant and powerless. They are passive followers of either a madman or the bosses. Billionaire playboys, cops and fascist “caped crusaders” are the true heroes that will save our cities from “revolutionary” terror.  

Keeping a lie like this alive is critical for the bosses. In the same way that Gotham is really a dictatorship of bosses like Bruce Wayne, ruled by fascist laws like the Dent Act, real-world capitalism is a dictatorship of the rich that continues to create chaos and racist terror for workers worldwide — from the cholera epidemic in Haiti to the ongoing imperialist wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan to the rampant murder of workers by police across the U.S. 

In the end, Batman saves the day, rescuing Gotham from a nuclear explosion. In the aftermath Gotham is left to believe that Batman has made the ultimate sacrifice. As the masses cheer, the idea of hope that Bane earlier in the film said was only a façade used to control people has been restored. 

Neither Batman, Bane, Obama
Nor Romney Will Save Us

As the 2012 presidential election approaches, the U.S. bosses hope to restore workers’ “hope” in capitalism in the face of continuing war, racist unemployment and economic crisis. But as the crisis worsens, workers can’t afford to wait around and “hope” that some politician will save us. Like Batman, both Romney and Obama serve the capitalist ruling class. No matter which candidate wins, the working class will lose. 

The problem with Rises and the Dark Knight series is not simply its political content, but the depth of skill with which it was made. The films are engaging and highly entertaining. Workers root for Batman to send the poor back to hell where they belong while they are asked by Nolan to rationalize things like mass surveillance programs, expanded police powers, and vigilante violence on behalf of the capitalist class. 

Batman is a capitalist fantasy, but it is a fantasy willing to get into the grittiness of real life and so becomes a powerful metaphor for the modern era. It cannot be simply dismissed as movie fantasy like other “rich savior” films such as Iron Man. Dark and brooding Batman feels real (after all, what differentiates Batman from other superheroes is that he is “just a man” without any super powers).

 And ultimately this film dramatization of capitalist fantasy threatens to become real as the working class imbibes these class politics with no communist politics to counter them. Our role is to expose this fascist vision with a fight for working-class politics and power. Our friends and family will see this film. It is our job to reveal its class bias and provide a real solution: communist revolution.

Capitalist individualism and its culture of violence fueled the recent massacre in Aurora, Colorado. James Holmes, a loner entranced by movie mayhem, shot 70 people, fatally wounding 12 — a deranged and despicable act.  

As the bosses’ media focused attention on his carnage, Holmes became the nation’s most notorious criminal. But there are far more lethal threats facing our class — from the capitalists themselves. Holmes’ mass murder, as horrific as it was, pales in comparison to the atrocities the U.S. ruling class routinely commits against its own workers. It is put in the shade by the U.S. war machine that mows down workers in the Middle East to secure the imperialists’ profits. 

While pundits cry that gun control is the only way to stop Holmes’ brand of freelance slaughter, capitalism kills exponentially more people without breaking a single law. Profiteers create mass poverty. Lifesaving health care is denied to tens of millions unable to pay the insurance and drug companies. Massive racist unemployment, an integral part of the system’s perpetual boom-and-bust crises, sends millions more to an early grave. Racist cop murderers in New York and Anaheim, California, to name but the latest, sustain the rulers’ profit-making by terrorizing black and Latino workers and youth.

If we want people to treat each other as sisters and brothers, we must destroy the system that breeds these horrors and creates ticking time bombs out of people like Holmes. In short, the profit system has got to go. We need a communist society, free of bosses, exploitation, racism, sexism and profits. We need a workers’ society led by a mass, revolutionary communist party to guarantee that our class will share all the value we create, according to need.

“Gun control” can’t be the answer in a country whose profit-makers are the world’s biggest suppliers of military weapons and who invade more countries than the rest of the world combined.

Talk about mass murder! For eight years, President Bill Clinton ordered the U.S. Air Force to enforce sanctions that denied food and medicine to workers in Iraq. Besides killing more than a million Iraqis, the sanctions paved the way for George H.W. Bush’s 1991 invasion. George W. Bush’s 2003 “shock and awe” invasion killed a million more Iraqis. Then, Barack Obama’s occupation and maintenance of U.S. military bases served to protect Exxon Mobil’s seizure of the country’s biggest oil fields. 

Remote-controlled U.S. aircraft drones currently liquidate dozens of workers at a time in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen and Somalia — another example of racism on a global scale. Most are civilians, which doesn’t stop Obama from taking credit and pride in ordering the hits personally.

Now the U.S. Army has issued a directive that justifies slaying innocents on a scale beyond the imagination of solitary madmen like Holmes. On July 18, the Army’s top general, Ray Odierno, sent a “doctrinal publication” called “Civilian Casualty Mitigation” down the chain of command. While warning that killing non-combatants can create anti-U.S. feeling, the document essentially gives the go-ahead to the practice when the stakes are high enough. Odierno’s death warrant reads in part:

In most cases, civilian casualties are a type of collateral damage…. [that] is not… excessive in light of the overall military advantage anticipated from the attack….When conducting combined arms maneuver against an enemy force, the opportunity to take decisive action against the enemy may take precedence over protecting civilians.

Preventing Iran from competing for Mideast oil exports no doubt meets Obama’s and Odierno’s profit-driven “ethical” test. The liberal Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported on July 29:

U.S. National Security Adviser Tom Donilon shared Washington's contingency plans for a possible attack on Iran with Israel's PM [Netanyahu], according to a senior American official....Donilon sought to make clear that the United States is seriously preparing for the possibility that negotiations will reach a dead end and military action will become necessary. 

A separate piece in the same Haaretz issue said, “Romney's senior national security aide Dan Senor told reporters that the Republican presidential candidate would ‘respect’ Israel's decision if it were to ‘take action on its own in order to stop Iran from attaining nuclear weapons.” Romney would have Israel do the dirty work. For his part, Obama recently offered to bribe fascist Israeli rulers with advanced weaponry if they delayed a strike on Iran’s nuclear sites until after the U.S. presidential election in November.

Obama and Romney may both be posturing to demonstrate their “toughness” on Iran to U.S. voters, but their positions are more than mere show. Hundreds of thousands of workers in Iran could become “worthwhile collateral damage” in a U.S. or Israeli assault on Iran’s potential nukes. Five years ago, Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR) cautioned:

It is impossible to predict in advance the number of people that would be killed and injured in a full attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities....[E]ven a narrowly targeted military plan would have severe public health impacts…. The Esfahan Nuclear Technology Center….is… only four kilometers from the city of Esfahan with one and a half million people.

PSR warns of the “potential to kill nearby populations similar to the accidental explosion of the chemical plant and release of chlorine gas in Bhopal, India.” Obama’s unholy “collateral damage” doctrine would sanction these murdered Iranians’ sacrifices for the sake of Exxon Mobil’s profits. This policy is the heir of President Jimmy Carter’s 1979 doctrine that U.S. oil interests must be guaranteed by any means necessary, including armed force. Such are the murderous doctrines of the “lesser-evil” Democrats.

Capitalism means the murder of workers. The Progressive Labor Party advances international class war against these rulers. We’re fighting back on five continents to organize against racist terror and lead workers to a communist future.

This includes South Asia, where women workers in PLP lead the struggle to rebuild villages ravaged by so-called natural disasters and worsened by capitalist profiteers.

It includes Haiti, where the Party is organizing against the cholera epidemic set off by invading UN forces.

It includes Brooklyn and the Bronx, New York, where PL’ers are leading the fight against the murderous racist cops. 

It includes Palestine-Israel, where Party members are fighting U.S.-backed Israeli billionaires who wipe out workers’ villages to build profit-making estates for the rich.

It includes Anaheim, where PL’ers are supporting rebels against racist police killings.

It includes Oaxaca, Mexico, where PL teachers helped lead the fight against government union-busting. In Mexico City, PLP led a struggle against government policies that flooded workers’ neighborhood.  

Out of these struggles, workers are joining the revolutionary PLP to build a mass party that will ultimately wipe out the capitalist scourge that butchers the international working class. Our Party will usher in a communist society to free our class from racism and sexism, poverty and mass unemployment, exploitation and imperialist war — forever!