International Executive Committee, October 26, 2023
Israel is at war with Gaza. In response to the attacks of 7 October, it is threatening bloody revenge. For more than two weeks, its army has been launching massive attacks against Gaza, but also against positions in Lebanon and Syria. In the West Bank, too, Palestinians demonstrating in solidarity with Gaza have been targeted with over 100 killed thus far. Israeli air bombardment and rockets, have killed around 5,000 people in Gaza and around one million – half of the inhabitants of the Gaza Strip – have fled to the south. Israel cut off food, water and medical supplies for days, and the limited number of lorries now being let through the Rafah crossing are, the UN says, totally inadequate. Gaza’s population is effectively being starved and its hospitals denied the power supplies needed for operations on the mounting number of casualties. A humanitarian catastrophe is taking place before the eyes of the world.
Yet we may be only at the beginning of what is threatened. A ground invasion by the IDF could be imminent. The Israeli government and the General Staff announced the largest mobilisation of the army in the history of the country. 360,000 reservists have been called up. Their task; to destroy Hamas, to “cleanse” Gaza of “terrorists”, indeed anyone who resists. Entire cities and infrastructure are threatened with destruction. Hundreds of tanks and artillery vehicles, tens of thousands of soldiers, are preparing to storm Gaza, whose north has already been largely razed to the ground.
In the face of this mobilisation of the entire nation, the differences between government and opposition in the Zionist camp have receded. The government of national unity and a five-member war cabinet made up of representatives of the government and the opposition parties has been given near-unlimited powers.
Israel’s war aims and their contradictions
The Israeli strategy aims at the “cleansing” and destruction of the entire Palestinian resistance in Gaza. Hamas, but also all other resistance forces (Islamic Jihad, PFLP, DFLP) are to be wiped out. To prepare the ground for this, cities and infrastructure are being systematically turned into rubble and large parts of the population expelled. The population was told to leave northern Gaza or face “devastating humanitarian consequences”, in other words, the murder of thousands upon thousands. Then the ground troops are to follow and the south of the country will then, doubtlessly, be targeted for “cleansing” too.
The elderly and the seriously ill will be unable to leave. Hospital authorities say that it will be impossible to move their patients, and victims of the continued bombing, along cratered and ruin-blocked roads, still under aerial attacks. To double the population density of what is already the most overcrowded territory on earth, when there is no spare housing, no supplies of water, or fuel, is at the very least collective punishment. In reality, if it is fully carried out, it will be more correct to call this genocide.
The emergency cabinet and the army only feign concern for the civilian population in order to appease the conscience of the “democratic” public in the West and to avoid a break in the united front of its supporters at home. In addition, Israel’s backers, first and foremost the USA, Britain and the leading EU powers, Germany and France, fear that a long, extremely barbaric campaign against the people of Gaza could ignite a conflagration in the entire Middle East. They fear that their reactionary allies in the Arab states (the Saudis, Egypt , the Gulf petro-monarchies) would no longer be able to maintain their de facto tolerance of Israel’s policies of recent years, and thus Western imperialist influence in the region would be further weakened.
Israel and its allies, above all Western imperialist governments, justify the war as an “act of self-defence” against Hamas “terrorism”. They declare their “unconditional solidarity” with Israel; the USA sent two carrier task forces to the eastern Mediterranean. France, Germany, the EU and Britain promise extra arms deliveries and material aid. At the same time, Biden, Scholz and the other leaders of the Western world urge respect for international law and the laws of war, fearing that too blatant a mistreatment of Palestinian civilians could further weaken the already battered Western imperialist dominance in the Middle East.
The idea that Israel’s attack is a war of self-defence is a complete reversal of reality. Its aim is not just to destroy Hamas and the other armed Palestinian factions, but to break the will and capacity to resist of the entire Palestinian nation. Yet the representatives of the Zionist regime and its imperialist allies know in reality, that decades of repression, bombardments, military incursions, have not been able to break their courage, even though they have increasingly degraded the everyday lives of the Palestinians, marginalised them more and more and continued the expulsion of the population, a process that has been under way since the foundation of the state of Israel.
Therefore, the extreme right wing of the Israeli leadership is pushing for the expulsion of the population of Gaza, for “complete cleansing”, for an exodus – and it is prepared to accept the thousands and thousands deaths that this will mean, a virtual pogrom of the entire population. The emergency government and the army leadership have adopted this rhetoric, at least in part. They racially dehumanise the Palestinians calling them “human animals” to be treated like wild beasts. They threaten those who do not flee with “devastating humanitarian consequences”; Gaza, they say, will not return to the way it was when the military operation is complete.
However, it is unclear exactly how this can be carried out. A ground invasion and a possibly protracted guerrilla struggle against the Hamas-led fighters could continue for days, weeks, even months. The Israeli government has said it intends to cut Gaza off entirely from the rest of Palestine. How this struggle ends, which side will win politically and what “order” will be established in Gaza depends, of course, on the determination of the resistance as well as the ruthlessness of the Zionist attack. If it is up to the Israeli right and large parts of the cabinet that rely on it, this can go as far as the mass extermination of the Palestinians there. At the moment, the statements of the emergency government go in this direction, but this should not hide the fact that there is no unity in the Zionist camp regarding the longer-term war aims and the future “reorganisation” of Gaza.
Therefore, limits are also being placed on the Israeli right within Israel One wing in the Zionist camp wants to secure some residual form of “democratic” rule in Israel (and not only vis-à-vis Netanyahu), but also to be able to integrate Palestinian forces such as Fatah and the PNA as its policing arm in the future.
Above all, however, Israel’s international allies are pushing for no permanent occupation of Gaza, for its future administration to be formally taken over by Palestinian collaborators. These conditions are also important in order to keep Saudi Arabia, Egypt and other Arab states as Western allies and to win them over for a possible resumption of talks at the end of the Gaza operation. However, this presupposes at least a saleable bogus solution to the “Palestine question” when Israel’s remorseless expansion of settlements has made this virtually impossible.
Effects and causes of the attack
The attack by Hamas-led Palestinian forces from Gaza has brought the Palestinian question back to the centre of politics in the Middle East and also international politics.
The US strategy since Trump, that of the Israeli government under Netanyahu, as well as that of the army leadership and intelligence services, has been to pursue a “peace settlement” in the Middle East without involving the Palestinians. Trump’s policy continued under Biden, in this regard, and the EU and its leading powers dutifully followed suit. The agreements with the United Arab Emirates, the negotiations with Saudi Arabia and other states for longer-term “normalisation” with Israel seemed to confirm this strategy.
The Israeli state basically assumed that it could continue to marginalise the Palestinians without effective resistance and without much of an international outcry; that settlement construction and land theft in the West Bank would continue, and that Gaza would be sealed off and its population further starved in isolation. The killing of over 300 Palestinians in the West Bank and the continued land grab going on into October 2023 seemed to confirm this. Even the protests of Iran and its allies were calculatedly cautious. Neither the regime in Tehran nor Hezbollah had any interest in a real military confrontation.
Most states in the Middle East have followed the path of Egypt and Jordan in recent years and effectively made their peace with Israel. The fate of the Palestinians proved no obstacle to intensifying their economic exchanges. Also, from a geostrategic point of view, Israel and Turkey, for example, as important arms suppliers and supporters of Azerbaijan, have cooperated in the expulsion of the Armenians from Nagorno-Karabagh (Arzakh). No wonder, then, that the Arab League’s first statements on Hamas’ attack on Israel and the threat of retaliation were cautious in the extreme. To this day, Egypt, Saudi Arabia or Jordan call for “moderation on all sides” or for a ceasefire. However, Saudi Arabia has suspended negotiations with Israel.
Even if at present the Arab states have no interest in a direct confrontation with Israel, the Hamas attack has dealt a severe blow to the Middle East strategy recently pursued by US imperialism and its allies. The idea of pacifying the Middle East to the exclusion of the Palestinians turned out to be a reactionary illusion. It has failed.
The Hamas attack was certainly motivated by several factors and was also the result of a decision by the military wing against the opinions of the political wing, based in Qatar. The latter feared the foreseeable crushing reaction of Israel. However, the increasing marginalisation of the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza in recent years confronted Hamas, like the entire resistance, with the alternative of being pushed more and more to the wall or daring to break out of the open-air prison in Gaza, knowing full well that Zionism would react with massive attacks in any case. The outbreak was thus essentially a reaction to the increasing isolation and the threatened loss of ostensible allies of the Palestinians like Saudi Arabia.
Overall, the war against Gaza has fundamentally changed the situation in the Middle East and made it, once more. a centre of instability. While on one side there is the threat of a counter-revolutionary, barbaric expulsion from Gaza and an annihilation of the Palestinian resistance, the oppressed can also turn the current situation in their favour by using the internal contradictions in the camp of Zionism and imperialist reaction. This in turn requires the working class to emerge as an independent, leading force in solidarity with Palestine and, by extension, in Palestine. Only if it unconditionally sides with the oppressed in the face of Zionism’s attacks, if it supports the resistance despite the latter’s reactionary Islamist political leadership, and mobilises against the governments in the West, if it breaks with support for Israel and unites with its class brothers and sisters in the global South, can it also emerge as a reliable ally of the Palestinian people.
Only then will the Palestinian masses be able to recognise that the reactionary Arab and Islamist regimes are not their allies, though their working classes and youth can be, and that there is a real alternative to the policy and strategy of Hamas and Fatah – a policy that combines the struggle for national liberation with that for socialist revolution. Only in this way will it be possible for the Palestinian working class to also become the leading force of the liberation struggle. And finally, only under the condition of a massive resistance and worldwide support for Palestine will it be possible to rescue the Israeli class from Zionism, so that not only a politically advanced anti-Zionist minority, but also the mass of wage earners come to realise that Zionism not only makes them accomplices in oppression, but that their own freedom and security under a regime built on the oppression of another nation is ultimately a chimera.
The international reaction
The international reaction to the outbreak of Hamas and the war on Gaza could not be more different. While the USA, Britain, Japan and the EU powers support Israel, imperialist rivals Russia and China call for a ceasefire and humanitarian aid, as do most states of the global South. Of course, they too more or less openly condemn Hamas and the Palestinian resistance. They want to return to the state pre-existing the war.
Of course, the policies of Moscow or Beijing have nothing to do with solidarity with Palestine. They are only pursuing their own imperialist interests, opposed to those of the West, and thus hope to strengthen their own geostrategic positions. The various regional powers in the region reject Israel’s attack, more or less openly or covertly, calling for “moderation” both because they are pursuing their own interests in doing so, but also because they fear destabilisation in their own countries and thus of their own rule. Reactionary Islamist regimes like Iran or reactionary Islamist movements also present themselves as the only consistent allies of the Palestinians. The fact that they openly propagate antisemitism must be exposed, as must their attempt to demagogically divert attention from their own dictatorship and support for counter-revolutionary regimes, for example in Syria.
But these alleged reactionary “friends” or “supporters” of Palestine must not obscure the fact that the sympathy of the masses in most countries of the world is with the Palestinian people and their liberation struggle. The masses of workers, peasants and youth in the semi-colonial countries see very clearly that the presentation of the war as a war between Israeli “democracy” and “Islamist terror” obscures the causes and the character of the war, that it is a war of an oppressor state against the oppressed. This is exactly what the Palestinian and Arab migrants in Western countries, as well as the vast majority of the racially oppressed population, know.
Therefore, for weeks, masses have been taking to the streets, following the call for large-scale demonstrations and global days of action. The streets in the global South are filling up – and this can and should become an international mass movement of solidarity with Palestine. Even in the Western states, public opinion is not as clearly aligned in favour of Israel as the government would like to have us believe.
In London, 150,000 took part in a demonstration in solidarity with Palestine on 14 October. and 300,000 a week later. While in Britain the right to demonstrate is still recognised, other European countries like Germany and, to a lesser extent, France, resort to extreme racist and anti-democratic measures, regularly banning demonstrations in solidarity with Gaza, arresting hundreds of people who refuse to comply with the bans and criminalising all organisations of Palestinian resistance.
To legitimise these measures, they resort to the lie that anti-Zionism, indeed almost all criticism of Israel, is antisemitic. Even reference to the causes of the current conflict is seen as “relativising” “Islamist terror”. This agitation is linked to a dramatic increase in anti-Muslim racism and is intended to prepare the population of the “democratic” states for the further erosion of democratic rights and to swear them to remain in solidarity with Israel even when more and more pictures of the massacres and war crimes of the Israeli army become public.
The extreme contrast between the situation in the semi-colonial and western imperialist countries also shows what to make of the claim that the whole world is behind Israel. The “world” is understood to be mainly the countries of North America and Europe, which are home to just 12% of the world’s population – and even there, “public opinion” is mainly the opinion published by the media trimmed to the imperialist raison d’état, they are in the hands of the Western states or the monopoly groups in the media sector.
These mainly reflect the interests of the imperialist governments and bourgeoisies. But they can also rely on the leaderships of the bureaucratised trade unions and most reformist parties – be it the SPD in Germany, Labour in Britain or the dwindling PS in France. The majority of European left parties also display full or covert solidarity with Israel or adopt a “neutral” stance in the struggle of the oppressed with the oppressors. This illustrates once again the social-chauvinist and pro-imperialist character of these parties and bureaucratised trade union apparatuses.
While they are outraged by the “terror” of Hamas and denounce the killing of innocent civilians, they support the Israeli attacks on Gaza, which have killed and will kill thousands of innocent Palestinian civilians. Instead of liberating the workers and oppressed in Gaza, instead of defending Palestinian and Arab migrants against racism and repression, these professional traitors support oppression.
Building a solidarity movement with Palestine is impossible without a determined struggle against these chauvinist and pro-imperialist misleaders of the working class. The necessary and justified criticism of the leaderships of the Palestinian liberation struggle, of Hamas, of Jihad, but also of the militant forces of Fatah, the PFLP and the DFLP, has a revolutionary and progressive value only if it is formulated on the basis of support for the liberation struggle. Otherwise, it is at best only an eloquent form of passivity in the present war or, as with the reformist leaderships, a form of support for Zionist and imperialist aggression.
The tasks of the workers’ movement
The first and foremost task of the left and workers’ movement around the world is to support the Palestinian liberation struggle. We stand for the defeat of Israel and demonstrate our solidarity with the resistance in Gaza and all of Palestine. At the same time, we do not hide our fundamental differences with the reactionary politics of Hamas, with Islamic Jihad, but also the fatally wrong policies of the Palestinian left. We support the liberation struggle, despite its leadership and its wrong strategy, policies and programme.
The position of the Zionist state in the Middle East, its central role as a stooge of Western imperialist interests, the huge armament build-up of the Israeli army and the extent of Western support also mean that the Palestinian resistance needs international support. Therefore, it needs an international strategy to lead the struggle to victory.
1. Resistance and liberation struggle in Palestine
In the current war, in the attack on Gaza, we support the Palestinian armed resistance. The longer it can resist the IDF, the higher the political and material price of the attack and invasion it will inflict on the oppressors.
The breakout of the Hamas-led forces from Gaza was itself a legitimate act in the national liberation struggle. Oppressed people have the right to break out of a territory in which they have been imprisoned by the oppressive state for years, where their supplies are blocked and rationed, where a large part of the population is condemned to unemployment, where infrastructure, housing, social and health facilities are repeatedly destroyed.
In the struggle against national oppression, it is of course legitimate to attack the military institutions and units of the oppressor, it is legitimate to respond to rocket fire with rockets. In all wars, civilian casualties are inevitable, although wanton cruelty to civilians harms not just the victims but appears as a justification for the far greater cruelty of the oppressors.
In reality, Hamas is not the origin of such bloodshed and horror. Rather, it is the Zionist state of Israel, which is based on the racist, colonialist expulsion of the Palestinians. On this basis, any democratic, peaceful and progressive solution is impossible as long as Israel dominates Gaza and the West Bank as internal colonies, permanently expels, dispossesses, and ghettoises their populations. With no justice there can be no peace.
Ultimately, Gaza is not really controlled by Hamas or any other political force active there, but by the Israeli state – just as prisons are not controlled by the prisoners, even if they are allowed to move “freely” within the prison walls.
As revolutionary Marxists, we are resolutely opposed to the strategy and policies of Hamas (and all Islamist forces) and its political regime. We also reject the arbitrary killing or massacre of Israeli civilians. This obviously makes it easier for Zionism and imperialism to present their large-scale attack on Gaza as “self-defence”, even in the eyes of many workers.
However, it is far too short-sighted to blame the indiscriminate killings of civilians only on Hamas or Islamism. They are also an expression of the much broader, decades-long oppression, the daily experience of misery, hunger and dehumanisation in Gaza caused by the Israeli closure. Out of national oppression grows hatred for the state of the oppressors and all those who support or openly support it, including the vast majority of the Israeli population and the Israeli working class.
The political struggle against the religious right in the camp of the Palestinian resistance and the criticism of politically wrong or counterproductive forms of action must in no way mean turning our backs on the struggle against oppression. Today, when Western propaganda turns the real conditions upside down, we must clearly distinguish between the violence of the oppressed and the violence of the oppressors. Only if the revolutionary left and the working class support the struggle for national liberation against Zionism and “democratic” imperialism, will they be able to build a political alternative to Islamist forces. Only in this way, will they be able to form a revolutionary party that combines the struggle for national liberation with that for socialist revolution.
This necessarily includes participation in the liberation struggle and militarily coordinated joint actions. It includes a policy of an anti-imperialist united front with all forces of resistance. In the West Bank and Israel, we support solidarity actions with the people of Gaza. We support mass protests and strikes against the occupation. We condemn and oppose the continued attacks and killings of Palestinians by Israeli security forces and armed settlers.
We also condemn in particular the use of PNA forces against protesters. These reactionary attacks on their own people must end, the PNA forces must break with their role as Zionism’s auxiliary police. They and their weapons must be subordinated to action committees of the Palestinian resistance. A new mass Intifada is called for .
But, in Palestine, it is not only a common struggle that is needed. The leaderships of the liberation struggle themselves have no strategy that can bring a revolutionary solution. Hamas and Islamic Jihad are reactionary, petty-bourgeois Islamist forces, with Hamas having a mass base not only because of its military capabilities but also because of its welfare programmes. Both organisations pursue the reactionary goal of a theocracy in Palestine, both combine anti-Zionism with antisemitism. Neither considers the working class to be the leading class in the liberation struggle, rather, they subordinate it and its class interests to those of the petty bourgeoisie and the bourgeoisie under the guise of “Islamic unity”. It is therefore no coincidence that their real international allies and supporters are not the Arab masses but the reactionary Islamist regimes of Iran, Qatar and Saudi Arabia or movements like Hezbollah.
The Palestinian left (PFLP and DFLP) is in fact politically subordinating itself to the leadership of Hamas – just as they subordinated themselves to Fatah in the days of the PLO. The “rejection front” against the Oslo Accords that the Palestinian left has formed with Hamas, Jihad and other groups is not a mere temporary military agreement, not a form of anti-imperialist united front, but basically a strategic alliance that amounts to a subordination of the Palestinian working class.
We oppose the bourgeois programmes and the stages theory that the Palestinian left advocates with a programme of permanent revolution. We stand for a common, bi-national, socialist state in Palestine that grants equal rights to Palestinians and Jews, guarantees the right of return to all displaced Palestinians, and is able to settle the claims of two nations fairly and democratically on the basis of common property in land and all the large scale means of production . Such a struggle will not be achieved through reforms, but only through the revolutionary overthrow of the Zionist state.
In Israel and Palestine, we also stand for the closest possible unity in struggle with the anti-Zionist forces of the Israeli left and movement. Only when the working class breaks with Zionism can it liberate itself.
However, we are aware that the Israeli wage earners have not only participated in the oppression, expulsion and super-exploitation of the Palestinian masses for decades, but that Labour Zionism as well as the “liberal” Zionists themselves were and are actively involved in the expulsions and oppression.
As important and correct as it is to exploit and promote divisions in the Zionist camp, and build bridges to the Palestinian struggle, we must have no illusions about the depth of the attachment of the Israeli workers to Zionism. Rather, we must be clear that their masses can probably only be won over to a break with Zionism under the impact of a deep crisis of the Zionist colonialist project. Therefore, the strength of the Palestinian liberation struggle itself is a central engine for deepening cracks in Zionism in the first place. The anti-Zionist left in Israel therefore has every interest in the success of the Palestinian liberation struggle and must support it unconditionally.
2. The Masses in the Middle East
In the Arab countries, in Turkey, in Iran as well as in the whole region, the class must support with its forces the mobilisations in solidarity with Palestine. At the same time, it must distance itself from reactionary or totally mendacious state institutions that misuse the Palestine question for reactionary purposes or their own geostrategic interests (e.g., Erdogan in Turkey).
Therefore, the trade unions and the left must not only mobilise under their own banner and with their own actions. They must also go beyond demonstrations and protest rallies. Transport workers should block all exports to Israel, for example, by refusing to load ships or planes or preventing them from departing.
They must demand the disclosure of all economic and military agreements as well as all secret contracts with Israel in order to expose the real cooperation of their allegedly pro-Palestinian governments and force a stop to this cooperation. They must stand for the closure of the military bases of the USA and its allies in Turkey and in the whole Arab region.
This struggle against the various reactionary governments must be combined with the struggle against the social and economic crisis as well as against the more or less undisguised dictatorships in order to usher in a second Arab Spring – an Arab Spring whose left and proletarian forces learn the lessons of the failure of the first attempt by recognising from the beginning the need to make such a revolution permanent and not to stop halfway. This requires building revolutionary workers’ parties in these movements, fighting for a programme of permanent revolution and for a United Socialist States of the Middle East.
3. The working class in the West
Solidarity with Palestine is a task for the entire global working class. In the war against Gaza, workers in all countries should take to the streets, express their solidarity and stop all material and military support to Israel through workplace and trade union actions.
However, the working class in the imperialist centres of North America and Europe have a key role to play in this, as these states are also the main economic and military supporters and allies of Israel. In Britain, it seems, the Rail and Maritime Trade union (RMT) has called on its members to block arms supplies to Israel. Workers around the world should boycott all trade with Israel by land, sea and air. Attempts to label such actions or rallies in support of Palestine antisemitic must be defied and exposed. The appeal of the Palestinian trade unions must be responded to not only with warm words but with actions.
In these states, we fight against any further military, financial and economic support to the Zionist state and its machinery of aggression. We demand the disclosure of all contracts, we fight to halt all arms exports and for the withdrawal of the strike forces from the Middle East, sent as back-up for Israel against Hezbollah or others.
In these countries, we fight against the massive, racist anti-Palestinian and anti-Muslim agitation. We fight against the criminalisation of the solidarity movement with Palestine, we demand the decriminalisation of all Palestinian organisations and associations and the removal of the so-called terror lists of the EU and the USA.
Solidarity with Palestine also requires a struggle in all Western countries to educate the working class about the lies and to expose the real causes of the war and the justification of the liberation struggle.
The mourning and sympathy with the civilian Jewish victims of the Gaza attack are misused as ideological preparation for supporting a war against the population there, which is to lead to the destruction of all resistance and mass expulsion. Hence the constant assertion that “solidarity with Israel” must not weaken even when “other pictures” come out of Gaza. In passing, the Bundestag in Germany also declares its support for military strikes in Lebanon and Syria and increased pressure against Iran.
We must resolutely oppose this agitation and warmongering, the official “public” opinion, to which not only almost all political parties of the “centre” – conservatives, liberals, greens, social democrats – as well as those of the extreme right, but even most left reformist organisations and the leaderships of the trade unions subscribe.
This is a necessary part of the struggle for a broad solidarity movement with Palestine, supported also by the working class and communities in Europe and North America with roots in the Middle East. The ruling class is also aware that even in those countries where a pro-Israeli mood prevails, it will not last forever. In the coming weeks, despite media distortions, there will also be repeated and ever more horrific pictures of the effects of Israeli bombardments with thousands of deaths and the hopelessness of hundreds of thousands of refugees in Gaza.
Today, we must work ceaselessly to expose the lies of the rulers in order to bring about a change of mood in the working class, especially in the trade unions. This will only be possible if we openly confront the incitement by the media, but also the social-chauvinist politics of the leaderships of the trade unions, the SPD and the Left Party, and denounce their support for the attacks on Gaza. Only in this way – if we combine solidarity with Palestine and the struggle against the chauvinism and racism of the leaderships of the movement – can and will it be possible to build a common solidarity movement for Palestine based on the progressive and internationalist sections of the class.
We call for
- An immediate halt to the Israeli bombardment and IDF killings on the West Bank
- Open the crossings into Gaza for fuel, food , water, medical aid and the news media.
- An end to “western” arms supplies to Israel, withdrawal of their warships from the region
- A workers’ boycott of Israeli trade and military assistance.
- Victory to the Palestinian Resistance
- For a united, secular, socialist Palestine, with equality for all its citizens, Israeli as well as Palestinian, as part of a Socialist Federation of the Middle East.