The massacres in Israel and Gaza accelerate the course towards a global armed conflict that only class war can prevent

Short text produced by MC/KpK just after the Hamas attack on southern Israel on 7 October 2023.

Author

Mouvement Communiste, Kolektivne Proti Kapitalu

Bulletin no. 26

11 October 2023

The massacres in Israel and Gaza accelerate the course towards a global armed conflict that only class war can prevent

The cowardly and cruel large-scale armed action by Hamas1 , Islamic Jihad and its local guardian, Hezbollah in Lebanon, against the civilian population of Southern Israel2 risks opening up a crucial new war front in the Middle East. It adds to those of Syria and Yemen, still active, along with Afghanistan and Iraq, presently deactivated. The attack shows the determination of the organisations that carried it out to “kill the Jews” and, more generally, anyone living in Israel, including immigrant workers (mostly Filipinos and Thais). The long-prepared operation was made possible by large-scale flows of money and weapons systems, mainly from Iran, Qatar, Kuwait, Oman and Hezbollah’s lucrative drug trade3 , not to mention massive speculation in crypto-currencies4 .
The military action of the Palestinian factions is destabilising the whole region, calling into question the timid rapprochement between Iran and Saudi Arabia which led to the exchange of ambassadors at the beginning of September 2023. This rapprochement had been encouraged and strongly desired by the two countries’ main buyer of hydrocarbons, China. The process of normalisation of relations between the two countries had also strengthened the position of Russia5 , the leader of OPEC+6 , in its relations with OPEC led by Riyadh. And this at a time when sanctions imposed by countries supporting Ukraine were attempting to hinder its oil exports7 . For all that, Moscow is not so unhappy about the conflict between Israel and Hamas because, on the one hand, it is driving up the price of hydrocarbons and, on the other, it is opening up a new theatre of war that is likely to divert attention from its invasion of Ukraine and keep Ukraine’s allies, led by the United States, “occupied” elsewhere. And once again, the European Union is showing itself to be disunited when it comes to concrete responses to this situation. In the framework of the many current geopolitical upheavals that are shaping the future blocs on the road to war, the Armenian populations of Nagorno-Karabakh have just borne the brunt of the aggression by Azerbaijan, a discreet ally of Israel.
The military action of Hamas and its allies also complicates the easing of diplomatic relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia, a process launched by former US president Trump in 20208 , and relaunched by his successor, Joe Biden, in summer 20239 . The agreement under discussion between the three parties, Washington, Riyad and Tel Aviv, must, according to the wishes of the Biden administration, lead to “concessions”, never specified, to the Palestinians10 . This is a perspective which was not to the taste of the government led by Benyamin Netanyahu, someone hostile to any modification of the status quo in favour of the Palestinians and a determined partisan reinforcing the colonisation movement in the land occupied by the Palestinians. Hamas, opposed in its turn to the rapprochement between Ryad and Tel Aviv, confirms its similarity to the extreme-right which is in power in Israel11 . For symmetrical reasons, the Israeli government and Hamas, with its allies and patrons in Tehran, have everything to gain from the war which has broken out following the large-scale action by Hamas. Netanyahu’s government, intends to exploit the fear and hatred to create “national unity” against the enemy within, the democracy movement, and the enemy outside, the Palestinians, all of them. Hamas, for its part, is driven by the same concern to reassert its reputation among the two million or so Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, and to take advantage of Fatah being discredited in the West Bank so as to take over from it. The converging interests of the two warring parties also extend to their respective diplomatic efforts. Tel Aviv wants no “concessions” to the Palestinians, just like Hamas.
Hamas’s military action immediately profits its patrons, the mullahs of the Iranian fascist regime12 . Prior to this action, the deployment of the Israeli army on its own soil gave priority to the northern border, to contain Hezbollah in Lebanon and to defend the colonists. For several years now, the Israeli army has been waging an asymmetrical, low-intensity war against irregular Iranian-led troops, mainly on Syrian territory. For Tel Aviv, the aim is to counter Iran’s strategic objective: to establish and secure a continuous logistical route linking Beirut to Teheran, via Syria and Iraq. Hamas’ action is forcing the hand of the Israeli army. This action allows Iran and its allies to regain the initiative and impose a terrain of conflict away from Teheran’s strategic objectives. The redeployment of the Israeli army could relieve the pressure on Syria, at least in the short term. Within this regional conflict, Hamas mercenaries work for their masters. For the Iranian mullahs, the civilian population of Gaza is no more than a sacrificial pawn on the geopolitical chessboard. Teheran intends to take advantage of this conflagration to burnish the image of a regime seriously shaken by the formidable democratic movement which has shaken the country for many years, and which was given a major boost by the heroic struggle of women against patriarchy and Islamism last year13 .
The Israeli government, for its part, is grappling with the deepening political crisis that has been going on since 201814 , largely provoked by the declaration of Israel as a “Jewish state”15 and the desire to place the Supreme Court under government control. This crisis is in turn fuelled by the polarisation of Israeli civil society between a secular camp, opposed to the executive control of the Supreme Court, and the reactionary social bloc led by Netanyahu. The crisis unleashed a broad-based democratic movement that followed, a decade later, in the wake of the great movement against the high cost of living and rents in 201116 . Protests against the high cost of living resumed on a smaller scale this summer.
Meanwhile, settlement activity has increased considerably, aggravating the conditions of apartheid suffered by the Palestinians. There are now almost 750,000 settlers, two-thirds of them in the West Bank17 , around 8% of the Israeli population, living on the land where only Palestinians used to live18 . The Palestinian territories are entirely controlled by Israel: water, electricity, “foreign” trade, currency etc. are all in Tel Aviv’s hands. What is new after many decades now is that a minority of Israelis are openly criticising the apartheid practiced against the Palestinians, by finally daring to call it by its name19 . Significant sectors of the protest movement against the executive control of the Supreme Court are even proposing to include the fight against apartheid in the reasons for their mobilisation.
On the Palestinian side, the merciless dictatorship of Hamas and its allies suffocates the Palestinians subjected to it in the Gaza strip. At the end of July and even in to October 2023, collective protests against the high cost of living broke out in the streets of Gaza City, a city of 700,000 inhabitants, and were immediately put down by the Hamas fascists. As in March 2019, this summer the trigger was the reduction by 15 dollars a month of the subsidies (100 dollars) allocated to the poorest families20 . In the West Bank, Fatah, now reduced to a corrupt clique who have lost credibility with the population, no longer controls the proletarian youth who dream of a new Intifada. Armed groups clash with the Israeli occupation troops in the camps and in the towns. The limits of these actions, which also target the settlers, are obvious, but they must not be equated with the anti-Semitic strategy of Hamas and its Iranian sponsors. This is so even if, in the current context, the new fighting formations on the West Bank are showing themselves to be susceptible to the self-interested “support” and “help” from Hamas and its Lebanese and Iranian patrons.
The coming war is the worst prospect for the Palestinian population as well as the Israeli one. Hamas did not target the Israeli army, preferring to massacre, rape, torture and humiliate hundreds of unarmed civilians. Behind the pitiful and deadly rhetoric of martyrdom, the Islamist murderers have proved their bogus courage21 by choosing easy targets. The Israeli government has responded in the same manner by increasing air raids on targets which it is difficult to describe as military and strategic. There is nothing “surgical” about the hundreds of air strikes and artillery bombardments on densely populated urban areas. The total state of siege of the Gaza Strip decreed by Tel Aviv confirms that the country’s executive wants above all to punish the population of the Palestinian enclave. The proletariat on both sides of the belligerent states does not have to choose between these two regimes that butcher them.
In November 2002, we wrote22 “Stopping the fighting in its present form, organisation and objectives could be considered as an element favourable to the proletarian cause. It is for this reason that revolutionaries must support all desertion and attempts at defeatism in both camps, without hiding the necessary critique of the pacifist and democratic illusions which they will inevitably give rise to. Resistance to the occupation and Israeli segregation represents, in the immediate term, the second element of a proletarian policy in the region. Yet, this resistance must not be conducted as it has been up until now. It must coordinate efforts against the war by Israeli oppositionists, Arab Israelis and Palestinian in the camps on the basis of demands and modes of combat that are as far as possible shared by all these components…. It is only when the Palestinian exploited have swept away the nationalists and religious figures of all stripes who act in the name of their dominant classes, and their Israeli class brothers and sisters have done the same, that war, discrimination and exploitation will be pushed back. Such a scenario, for the moment, sounds like a pipe dream. Nevertheless, it constitutes the only realistic way out of the endless confrontation between the two peoples, whose purpose is nothing other than maintaining the power of the respective dominant classes.”
We still defend every word. Along these lines, we abhor and fight against all those, from the extreme-right to the extreme-left, who support Hamas and its allies by passing them off as champions of the Palestinian resistance to colonisation and apartheid. Their anti-proletarian nationalist positions are written into the preparation for world imperialist war and in the reinforcement of the tendency to transform “liberal” democracies into plebiscitary democracies and even proto-fascist regimes23 .