La Sinistra Comunista Internazionale

“Communists reject the moral criticism of the existing state of affairs and any vain outrage against the violence visited by man upon man. Communists align themselves with their class and against the current and well-defined bourgeois violence, as well as its economic roots.

To avoid any misunderstanding, we set out our overall position on the issue. The unequal war between Israelis and Palestinians cannot lead to any result as long as it remains in the context of two opposing ‘national questions’. Certainly, the solutions proposed within the framework of long-standing agreements are unfavourable from every point of view: from the purely bourgeois perspective, because two opposing national questions on the same territory have no solution; from the purely communist perspective, because instead of clearing the ground from the national issue, they make it more virulent than ever; from both the bourgeois and communist perspectives, because they do not favour the conditions for the development of the proletariat, neither Israeli nor Palestinian. The Palestinian struggle is one of the classic cases that can only be resolved in the context of a communist revolution; however distant such an outcome may be, there are NO alternatives.

From the outset, the Jewish bourgeoisie was unable to resolve the problem of its state alone, and was used by American imperialism during its struggle against the old European imperialisms, to achieve strategic penetration into the Middle East. Jewish terrorism in the early days, and then the war, had driven the Palestinians from their lands, forcing them into the political orbit of the Arab nations. Some of these, in turn, had been induced to accept the ambiguous and wavering support of the USSR.

The former balances, already disastrous for the Palestinians and the Arabs in general, no longer exist. Today, less than ever, the Palestinians cannot resolve their national problem by once again appealing to the inconsistent and divided Arab bourgeoisies. In any case, any autonomous national policy in a delicate area like the Middle East is mere appearance: the Israeli bourgeoisie, even if it tries to play an autonomous role, is in fact at the service of the USA, while the Palestinian bourgeoisie depends on the Arab and non-Arab states of the region (Syria and Iran). Other actors, mainly Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, depend on the global policy of the United States.

Even Europe, despite its own aspirations for economic and political independence from American imperialism, actually proves to be impotent, submissive, and even servile. This is why the situation became bogged down in a senseless, cruel massacre on both sides. Ruthlessness against martyrdom.

Faced with these historical facts, Palestinians’ aspiration for an independent state ends up with a completely ruinous reality: the simulacrum of a state without territorial continuity in the West Bank and Gaza was the fruit of agreements between powers and arose on a disarmed, constricted territory, without an economy, without national sovereignty, ‘conceded’ by Israel in order to contain the millions of Palestinians that could not be settled on the territory of the Israeli state, in a large concentration camp subjected to its every whim.

Israel is policy over the last 20 years has sought to consolidate the Dagan Plan (2001), that is, the fragmentation of Palestinian territories. The West Bank and Gaza are thus completely cut off from each other, with a distinct government in each territory. This has also involved supporting and fueling an alternative force to Al Fatah, namely Hamas, in which anti-Israeli nationalism backed by Islamic fundamentalism has found a way to crucify both the Palestinian proletariat and the Israeli proletariat along with the Arab proletariat in general: a force, therefore, that would channel a part of the Palestinian forces away from objectives that fuel class contradictions, or that lead to positions aimed at uniting the proletarians of both sides for the objective of a single state, neither Arab nor Jewish, but larger than the current Israel. It is a fact that Hamas was financed, at least in its early days, by Mossad, with the primary purpose of countering Al Fatah’s influence among the Palestinians, thereby sapping its strength.

The ‘birth’ of a new ‘radical’ formation, moreover, drew strength and support from the very conditions in which the development and constitution of the Palestinian National Authority were taking place. After decades of projects and resolutions, and after years of active collaboration between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, the material situation of the Palestinian proletariat worsened. The settlements have not decreased but increased; the economy of Gaza and the West Bank is much more devastated than before; the Palestinian proletarians who worked in Israel have remained largely unemployed, and the same Arabs in Jerusalem risk being expelled. As soon as the Palestinian Authority had the opportunity to exercise control over a territory granted in coerced autonomy, it developed the police force first and foremost: not industry, administration, schools, or agriculture, but the police, with  direct help from Israel! This was part of the agreements to disarm the fighting factions, which did not accept the balance of power within the P.L.O. (Palestine Liberation Organization).

This situation was not accepted by all Palestinian masses, and thus set in motion a dynamic that was developing a force potentially capable of overcoming the contradictory politics of the PLO, still prisoner of the internal logic of the current leadership of the movement, which constituted a political-military block of heterogeneous currents and therefore open to every compromise. The PLO has always been an emanation of other people’s policies, corrupted by contributions from Arab states, subservient to the politics of Western states that make it the only official interlocutor. This organization has always been the architect of Palestinian defeat. It did appeale to a ‘holy war’ of the Arab nation, knowing full well that it was a falsehood, as it was ready to sit at every negotiating table to which it was invited, without real strength as an eternal non-entity. Hamas, initially favored by Israel, after being part of Israeli designs to break the Palestinian front, weakened the PA to the point of making it a dependent and no longer necessary appendage of Israeli politics, was branded as a terrorist organization in order to accelerate its isolation. The results are plain to see. The State of Israel is the sole ruler of the territory between the Mediterranean and the Jordan. After the death of Arafat, it transformed Abu Mazen’s Government in the West Bank into a protectorate, which has had to act according to the political needs of Israel, at least, as long as its opposition to Hamas serves Israeli objectives. Gaza, once governed by Yasser Arafat’s Fatah party, has been in the hands of Hamas since 2006. The Israeli embargo has turned it into the world’s largest prison camp: here the Palestinian masses are reduced to animals in a cage, without electricity, without food supplies, without milk for their children.

Since 2006 Israel has applied every kind of pressure to weaken the Hamas government and prevent it from operating effectively, causing the wrath of the population forced to live in extreme conditions to revolt against it. The result: the Israeli state  faces two Palestinian liberation movements: al Fatah, based in the West Bank, led by a weak president, Abu Mazen, who is widely discredited and conciliatory; and Hamas, based in the Gaza Strip, which has grown and evolved, claiming to be the true custodian of the ‘resistance against the occupation’, which necessarily had to rely on Iranian and Syrian interests in the region, and has proven able to apply its policies in the Strip.

The harsh blockade imposed on Gaza for many months and the embargo on merchandise, which created significant difficulties in supplying any kind of goods to the population, did not succeed in undermining the political power of Hamas. On the contrary, Hamas, which in the meantime had swiftly taken control of the tunnel system dug beneath the border with Egypt through which all kinds of merchandise were passing, quickly became the manager of all the smuggling that saved Gaza from starvation. This had the positive effect of boosting Hamas’ finances and increasing its popularity among the population of the Strip. The attack by Hamas on October 7, the military action on Israeli territory with armed men, drones, and missile launches, is undoubtedly a demonstration of its economic and military strength.

Israel, on the other hand, cannot and will not accept having a militarily strong neighbor that could jeopardize its security, and it is for this reason that it continues its offensive actions in the Gaza territory. This attitude has a material basis: the dynamics of economic, demographic, and political growth of the populations in the area. Thus, the crux of the matter is that a further division of the territory with the Palestinians, at its expense, risks becoming intolerable, as no local bourgeoisie can renounce the prerogative of defending and protecting its territory, starting from the most elementary problems, such as water in a desert region and the scarcity of cultivable and habitable land. In any case, even from a military point of view, Israel does not have an economy capable of sustaining a complex logistics such as a generalized war that lasted more than a few weeks could involve. In fact, it does not have territorial size, population, and sufficient resources to autonomously respond to the challenges that history has placed before it. It is clear that the spontaneous question that immediately arises is: why must the two Palestinian leaderships and the Israeli state collaborate?

The answer is very simple: the stakes of the ‘Gaza massacre’ are to establish who is capable of controlling the Palestinian proletariat. First Al Fatah, then Hamas (since 1987), have attempted to do so by trying to channel the class hatred nurtured against the Middle Eastern bourgeoisies solely towards the Israeli bourgeoisie. Israel, meanwhiile, must act as a counter-revolutionary policeman in the Middle East, and at all costs prevent the unleashing of a revolutionary process that, spreading to the entire region (including Egypt), would devour it.

We will not revisit the entire history of Palestine, but it is essential to start with the fact that in the territories of Gaza, the West Bank, Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan, there are over 6 million Palestinian refugees, many of whom were driven from their lands and crowded into miserable refugee camps. For them, the establishment of the State of Israel is still perceived as an invasion by a foreign, arrogant, and lethally militarized population that simply plundered their land. It is well known that the primary Palestinian organization, the PLO, initially emerged to militarily combat Israel, in the futile hope of reclaiming all of Palestine (which, It is worth remembering, was never a nation, but merely part of an Ottoman administrative division) and permanently lowering the flag of King David. This hope was in vain because, firstly, Israel has enjoyed substantial economic and especially military support from the USA since its inception, and secondly, the Arab states in the region, which have engaged in several full-fledged wars against the Israeli army, have failed miserably, mainly due to the specific conditions under which they emerged as nation states. In fact, although there was a theoretical possibility in the 1950s of engaging in a revolutionary struggle under the banner of pan-Arabism, rallying the poorer masses against largely pre-capitalist and colonialist political and social structures entrenched in land ownership and the production of raw materials for export, the bourgeoisies of these new states ultimately accepted as fact the fragmentation carried out by the colonial powers, focusing solely on consolidating their respective national unities, and jealous of their particularism. When the chance of a social revolution that could have potentially unified the entire Middle East and North Africa into a single state evaporated due to this nationalist particularism,  this fact also understandably resulted in effective support for the Palestinians. Any support provided to democratic revolutions in the area was indeed in line with the logic of supporting individual national bourgeoisies, not a general and unified popular uprising.

We can certainly say that this paralyzing nationalist particularism is a characteristic that has marked inter-Arab relations, a paralysis that actually was, and still is, rooted in the Arab bourgeoisies’ quest for internal stabilization. In other words, the Arab bourgeoisies, which matured in the shadow of traditional colonialism, are born corrupt and imbued with the ideologies of the most reactionary imperialist bourgeoisies, primarily concerned with securing themselves against the risk of open, widespread class struggles breaking out. In relations between states, therefore, nationalism always serves well, both internally and externally. It is no surprise that during the first war with Israel in 1948, the various Arab military contingents each operated under their own command. But even later, after the creation of the Arab League and the establishment of a unified military command, this was seen as a compromise to balance what each nation considered its specific interests. The fact is that the Arab League is a dead body, precisely because of act of creation. In fact, its insurmountable nationalistic particularisms permanently hobble it. In the imperialist phase, it could hardly be otherwise. To imagine the existence of an international organization, the result of some equilibrium of its constituent nationalisms, and to expect it to be  substantially independent of any global imperialist equilibrium, is an  absurdity, both theoretically and practically.

The Palestinian bourgeoisie, namely the one that today fundamentally identifies itself with the former PLO, now the Palestinian National Authority (PNA), is the most corrupt and servile that the region has produced, not because of any inherent flaw, but due to its intrinsic political weakness, and this is because of its insurmountable economic insubstantiality. It is, therefore, obvious that it has remained under the pressure of economic-political blackmail and the shifting equilibrium between the various Arab states in the region. In the final analysis, it is probably one of the most corrupt bourgeoisies, certainly condemned to welcome every form of blackmail, in the broadest sense of the word.

In managing the Palestinian issue, Israel has limited options: if it formalized Greater Israel ‘from the river to the sea’ by annexing the Palestinians, it would spell the end of Zionism, given that in that area, considering demographic trends, the inhabitants of Jewish descent are becoming a minority. If, on the other hand, it granted real autonomy to the Palestinian territories, it would have to stop the settlers and relocate those already settled, risking a revolt and mutiny in the army. The Israeli state prefers the formation of a Palestinian state with limited sovereignty and scant resources, where the majority of the Arab population can be relegated. There are 6 million Palestinian refugees in the Middle East, divided among Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq. Overall, the Palestinian population is more than double the Jewish Israeli population, and the return of Palestinian refugees, as provided for in the 1948 UN resolution, would endanger the Zionist character of the Israeli state.

It is crucial not to forget that the founding basis of the State of Israel is Zionism, the most virulent and oppressive form of Jewish nationalism and racism, and that this ideological foundation continues to be the all-encompassing expression of its politics. Its enforcement  over the entire Jewish society rests on a further consequence: the elimination of all class struggle and a focus on the ‘external enemy’ which, precisely through wars, conflicts, and repression, further consolidates its internal unity. For Israel, having an enemy at the gates has always been the condition for pursuing its own inter-class unity, a powerful tool to neutralize its own working class. It must not be forgotten that significant groups of proletarians, especially from Central Europe, with deep traditions of struggle and purely proletarian experience, were brought together in Israel, and these had to be ‘sterilized’ to assimilate them into Zionism. The early Israeli Communist Party (even though influenced by Stalinism) did not support the heightened nationalism of Israel, and the economic organizations still served, more or less, to defend the working class (even though, from their inception, the attitude of Israeli Unions has been the exclusion of Arabs). The union, in fact, a mainstay of the State even before the State was formally established, is the quintessential tool for neutralizing the Israeli working class in support of Zionism, not unlike fascist corporatism.

The entire area, as statistics tell us, is today under the cloud of an economic recession. Even though the anti-proletarian action of the State has never ceased, right from the origin, it is now Israel’s  main concern. News reports inform us that, despite the condition of permanent war and the militarization of the entire Israeli society, economic struggles have not disappeared.

The essential condition for the existence of Israel is to continue to fuel the inter-class unity inherent in Zionism which, at its core, is nothing else but one of the extreme forms of nationalism. Israel’s encirclement and the state of permanent war, together with the militarization of the entire society, are hardly an unfortunate accident yet to be eliminated, but which, with goodwill and an ‘enlightened’ policy. could lead to a ‘just peace’. Instead, they are part of the calculations of Israeli leaders and implicit in the founding statute of the Israeli State.

When we consider the interests of different classes, while all bourgeois strata, in one way or another, enjoy their relative class privilege through capitalist competition (privileges defended  by the repressive and discriminatory actions of their state ), the Israeli working class alone could, without giving up the defense of its interests, consider Arab proletarians as their class brothers. This reveals the actual objective of Zionism, namely, the action of the Israeli bourgeoisie to preemptively neutralize any independent proletarian classism. It is then not so incomprehensible that the Israeli bourgeoisie sees, objectively and beyond any ‘conspiracy’ (which is never ruled out), Islamic fundamentalism as the ideological counterpart of Zionism in the Arab realm–its ‘class ally’ against the entire proletariat of the area, the confederation of all bourgeois states in a preemptive alliance against the proletariat. The 1871 of the Middle East, but without an Arab Commune?”

The burning issue is that not even the shift from nationalism (Al Fatah) to Islamism (Hamas) has proven capable of containing the dynamism of the Palestinian proletariat. Israel wants a weak Hamas (just as it has weakened Al Fatah) in relation to itself, but strong against the Palestinian proletariat (imposing the yoke of Sharia on women and youth). Therefore, Israel needs Hamas, as much as Hamas needs Israel! Consequently, there is no solution to the ‘Palestinian question’ on national and bourgeois grounds. How blind (but it is class blindness!) appear those same ‘experts’ of international politics, who reproach Israeli leaders for ‘political miscalculation’ because with ‘collective punishment,’ instead of suppressing and defeating a supposed ‘Islamist terrorism’, they are only pushing the Arab masses into the arms of Hamas. It is certainly an objective fact, but it is not accidental, nor is it a mistake.

If, as we have said, Zionism and Islamic radicalism are the two complementary sides of the same coin, further consequences follow. ‘Islamic radicalism’ itself–without any specious distinction–is the specific form of anti-proletarian action adopted by the Arab bourgeoisie.

Its characteristic demand: four sandy patches of an independent Arab state – or worse, an Islamic microstate – is the inter-class trap set for the proletariat to divert them from their historical task. The continuous massacres of the Arab population, for which both bourgeoisies are solely responsible, are social expressions of the same mode of production. On both sides of the front, the typical cynicism of a corrupt and reactionary bourgeoisie prevails, which, to preserve itself as a ruling class, is well prepared to bleed its proletariat in an endless drip of murders (‘suicides’, executions, or ‘fighters for democracy’, it is all the same), as long as the proletariat does not unify its struggles.

Finally, whether they agree to formalize the existence of a nominally independent Palestinian state or not, Zionism and Islamic radicalism will be, today and in the future, intrinsically incapable of solving the ‘Palestinian question,’ because they are powerless to eliminate the objective conditions upon which it arose. Not that some diplomatic solution is absolutely impossible, but, by necessity, it can only be based on ‘a balance of forces’, the only equilibrium that can be established in a society founded on the capitalist mode of production.  This means that, even from a purely ‘practical’ standpoint, there is no solution that can eliminate the hatreds, resentments, and spirit of revenge, based on ‘divine rights’.

It is often objected that even if a purely proletarian movement were to reassert itself, it could not automatically eliminate the national-racial-religious hatred that has built up over decades of continuous opposition between the two communities. We admit that even a proletarian solution would certainly be difficult and laborious, but it is undoubtedly within the reach of an international communist movement. Indeed, it is nonsensical to hypothesize a resurgence of the proletarian movement, and continue to project the same characteristics of the current era into such a profoundly changed situation. The rebirth of a proletarian movement which – it is impossible to imagine otherwise – would have to emerge on the terrain of open struggle, would itself signal the beginning of the end of the current divisions, not certainly their disappearance by magic, but nevertheless the objective condition for overcoming them.

Certainly, there is a need to take sides, but on the class front: against the Palestinian, Israeli, and general Arab bourgeoisies, which chain the entire proletariat of the region to the rock of nationalism and religious fundamentalism, in a massacre that will end only with the end of the poisonous myth of the State. Our full support and solidarity go to the Palestinian proletariat, which struggles daily for survival and, in doing so, clashes against a bourgeoisie (Hamas in Gaza and Al Fatah in the West Bank) that defends its own interests and privileges tooth and nail. Solidarity also with the Israeli proletariat and those in Israel who oppose  the Gaza massacre, deserting and/or sabotaging military operations, manifesting their aversion to the policy of the Israeli bourgeoisie in all possible forms. We direct our class hatred and our deep contempt toward all the Middle Eastern bourgeoisies that exploit and send the proletarians in these destroyed and bloodied lands to their deaths.

It should be borne in mind that the national liberation struggles (Congo, Algeria, Angola, Mozambique, Vietnam) ended half a century ago and that the last bourgeois anti-feudal revolution, in China, concluded in 1949. Nor should we forget that ‘Israel represents a real transplantation of modern capitalism into the desert regions of Palestine, abandoned for centuries. The capitalist industrial revolution has reached the extreme limit of historical possibilities there, constituting an example of a thorough bourgeois revolution, since there is no trace of pre-existing feudal relations.’ (The Crisis of the Middle East, 1955, Il programma comunista nn. 20-21). So there are no anti-feudal or anti-imperialist national revolutions to be made.

The international of ‘left-wing idiots,’ even in this case, do not hesitate to take to the streets (in a national-socialist variant) in defense of the Palestinian people (who they forget are divided into social classes), when not directly supporting the fascist group Hamas; here they find themselves in good company with the ‘right-wing idiots’ of openly fascist groups. There are also left-wing idiots who support Israel as the ‘only democracy in the M.O.’; thus finding themselves in good company with the institutional ‘right-wing idiots’.

The dustbin of History awaits them. It is only a matter of time, and we can wait.

The proletarians have only one path to follow: trevolutionary defeatism. Their own bourgeoisie is the first enemy to be defeated. In conflicts in the imperialist era, the proletariat must place its hope in the defeat of ‘its’ government and fight for a revolutionary insurrection when the insurrection that was supposed to prevent the war has failed. These teachings come to us from the past (Lenin 1916) but are as valid today as they were then. Taking sides, therefore, assumes a broader meaning: for communists it means that proletarians must fight every day to defend their condition and they do so because they are part of a worldwide revolutionary proletarian class that periodically directs its anger against capitalist exploitation. The Palestinian proletariat, the Israeli proletariat, and the Arab proletariat must find the unity that will give them the strength to embark on a revolutionary path throughout the Near and Middle East, against all nationalisms, against the reactionary Arab bourgeoisies that are completely subservient to Russian, American, Chinese imperialism. No other way exists.

There is only one solution: world revolution led by the future International Communist Party.