La Sinistra Comunista Internazionale

The bourgeois war in the imperialist phase of capitalism often takes on the characteristics of the extermination of civilian populations. The communist left has always been aware of this “novelty” that has existed for more than a century, and that is why there is no reason to be surprised, as the hypocrites are, by the immense and infamous massacre taking place in Gaza. Extermination is one of the methods used by the capitalist regime to deal with its increasingly serious and irreversible crisis. The phenomenon of extermination warfare is sometimes presented by the media, that is, by the powerful ideological apparatus in the hands of the bourgeois ruling class, as a sudden and almost unexpected event, and this aspect must be taken into account because it allows the states and political factions involved in the war to impose on the subaltern masses an artificial interpretation of the processes taking place. In reality, there is nothing unexpected in the sudden outbreak of a conflict and its tendency to turn into an indiscriminate massacre of civilian populations: the bourgeoisie, unable to assume the role of general class due to its internal conflicts, rides the wave of crises that cause economic struggles to turn into wars. At a certain point in the course of the crisis, the ruling class sees war as the inevitable solution to the accumulation of uncontrollable contradictions and adapts itself to prepare for the conflict in time, both militarily and ideologically. In this last aspect of war preparation, each state’s propaganda machine works well in advance to cultivate its own “public opinion,” subtly and without revealing too much, the most absurd and false prejudices against the nations and ethnic groups against which the destructive fury of its army will one day be directed. In the years and decades leading up to the outbreak of the conflict, ideological poison will be administered in ever-increasing doses to the masses through newspapers and television programs, misrepresenting the enemy “people,” who will be described as having a long list of negative characteristics that will eventually take root in the widespread belief that they are fundamentally inhuman.

In the case of the massacres in Gaza, if a large part of the Israeli population today tends to support the atrocious actions of its army, it is because the propaganda campaign to dehumanize the Palestinian ethnic group has a long history that has gone through various phases before taking a qualitative leap forward following the attack on Israel carried out by Hamas and other Palestinian political groups on October 7, 2023. For the Nakba, the “Catastrophe” of 1948, to happen, it was definitely necessary for widespread hatred toward the Palestinian people to take hold among the Zionist militias. In some cases, the Palestinian population was subjected to brutal massacres and eventually forced into a mass expulsion from Palestine of at least 710,000 people. In today’s political language, this would be referred to as “ethnic cleansing” on a massive scale. In this regard, it is worth recalling how the introduction of this term in the media during the 1990s to describe phenomena related to the Balkan wars provided the ideological basis for justifying NATO’s military intervention against Serbia over the Kosovo issue. An essential element of Israeli propaganda throughout the nearly eight decades since the Nakba has been the constant and systematic denial that the birth of Israel was inextricably linked to this tragic “ethnic cleansing.” The mainstream Israeli press, with rare exceptions, has never admitted this, nor has the mainstream press in Israel’s allied countries. More recently, the concept of “ethnic cleansing” has been associated with the Palestinian Nakba by Israeli historian Ilan Pappé, who for several years has been the point of reference for an “alternative narrative” of the birth of Israel in his country and abroad. On the other hand, for several decades, at least until the Oslo Accords of 1993, the mainstream Israeli press hardly ever used the term “Palestinians,” always preferring “Arabs,” since, with the exception of a minority “niche” press, the existence of a Palestinian ethnic group that differed in any way from the rest of the Arab world was not recognized. Thus, for decades, the stereotype of the “terrorist Arab” always ready to threaten the lives of Israelis or Jews in general, to destabilize and ultimately destroy the State of Israel, has been perpetuated. The Palestinians, however, are the oppressed nation, and therefore the Israeli “narrative” has often aroused understandable antipathy even far from Palestine in many parts of the world. This repulsion from the Israeli version has been the basis for a completely reverse narrative on the part of several Arab and Muslim countries. In the 1950s, the assertion of different trends within Pan-Arabism on the issue of Palestine and the birth of Israel adopted a narrative designed to sidestep an essential aspect that accompanied the early years of the new state’s foundation, namely an “ethnic cleansing” that mirrored the Nakba and led to the expulsion of 850,000 Jews belonging to local Jewish communities.This is something that is systematically omitted by those who have taken up the banner of anti-Zionism and desire a “Palestine free from the river to the sea.” At the same time, those who advocate the destruction of Israel as the only solution to the problem of Palestinian national oppression, with the exception of the most openly anti-Semitic elements, hardly admit that their position sees no other way out for Israeli Jews than exile.

This last point shows how the possibility of the end of “their own” state is difficult for Israelis to accept, and how even the possibility of establishing a Palestinian state alongside Israel is viewed with suspicion, if not outright hostility. If we have sought to review the ideological material that has accumulated in the field of bourgeois politics, albeit in a very summarized form, it is because we wish to emphasize how remaining under the domination of capital makes it extremely difficult, indeed practically impossible, for the Middle East region to undergo a political and social evolution that avoids new wars and new massacres.

Our Marxist political current proposes a vision of the conflicts in the Middle East and the Palestinian question that is completely different from that of both the Israel’s supporters and the “anti-Zionists.” What separates us from both sides is, above all, our awareness of the absurdity of an interclassist vision and our refusal to adopt clichés that would lead us to evaluate “peoples” in an ethical sense. We, as Marxists, consider that the very concept of “people” is an arbitrary abstraction, since behind this term lies an indistinct amalgam of different and mutually antagonistic classes. Turning to the subject of Zionism, it should be remembered that our current has been analyzing this phenomenon for several decades, placing it in the context of historical events in Europe between the last decades of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century. Although Zionism was judged from the outset by Marxists as a reactionary movement, it is undeniable that it was the product of the national oppression suffered by Jews in Eastern Europe and the failure of the integration process in the rest of the Old Continent. Karl Marx, in “Zur Judenfrage” (“On the Jewish Question”) in 1843, had already explained how the only condition under which Jews could achieve emancipation was to be found in the end of the political state. This end of the political state is an essential element of our communist program, and for over 180 years we have pointed to it as the inevitable outcome that the historical movement of human society will sooner or later reach.

During the 19th century, within the Russian Empire, tsarist decrees had greatly worsened the condition of Jews, forcing them to live in so-called “residence zones.” Subjected to double oppression, national and class, in the last decades of the tsarist autocracy, a large part of the Jews joined the labor movement, and at first Zionism was not very successful. The Bund, the Jewish workers’ party, was also decidedly anti-Zionist. The Russian Social Democrats, with Lenin at their head, rightly condemned Zionism as a reactionary movement, since it divided the international class movement and opposed the spread of feelings of solidarity among proletarians of different nations. But the labor movement was definitively defeated with the rise of Stalinism in the 1920s and the strengthening of the global counterrevolution, and thus the massacres of World War II forced a large part of the Jewish masses to see the birth of the State of Israel as their only chance for salvation. Since then, several generations of Israeli Jews have lived on Palestinian soil, and nothing seems more strange and hateful to them than the idea that their presence could be erased from the region and that they would be forced to find another place to live. When it comes to the question of land to live on, this perspective and sentiment are no different from those of the Palestinian masses who have lived for decades under Israeli military occupation in the West Bank and Gaza, or who live in very difficult conditions in refugee camps in Arab countries bordering Israel. The latter, due to the marginalization they suffer in their “host” countries, continue to see “return” to Palestine, to their towns and cities of origin, as the only possible prospect for a dignified and decent life. All these aspects must be taken into account to explain how eight decades of bourgeois rule after the Second World War have only exacerbated the situation in the Middle East, without even attempting to offer a way out of the permanent conflict that would be acceptable to all parties involved. This solution was not possible then, nor is it possible today, because the bourgeoisie knows no peace other than armed and unjust peace. On the Israeli side, there has been a growing radicalization of nationalism with the rise of increasingly militaristic governments that have made hatred of the Palestinians an absolute imperative and imposed increasingly unbearable and degrading national oppression on them. At the same time, in the Palestinian arena, despite the creation of the Palestinian National Authority in 1994 and the subsequent development of collaboration with the occupying power by some sectors of the Palestinian bourgeoisie, there has been a weakening of secular and left-wing (bourgeois) political organizations and the rise of religious and obscurantist elements whose explicit goal is the destruction of Israel and the death or exile for jews. In the particular case of the Gaza Strip, the Israeli blockade that had isolated it from the rest of the world allowed Hamas to assert itself as the absolute arbiter in a de facto state that spent more than fifteen years preparing an asymmetrical but deadly war against Israel. Thus, the two parallel processes in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories had been on a collision course for several years before the clash manifested itself in the Palestinian attack of October 7, 2023, and the subsequent Israeli response with the destruction of Gaza. This marked a leap into a new phase of the conflict in which the annihilation of the adversary became the only possible outcome for the forces involved.

Today, the massacre of the population of Gaza is often described as genocide. This is a term toward which we cannot help but feel a certain distrust, stemming from the fact that it emerged in the realm of bourgeois legal terminology and, in the past, was often associated with the expression “ethnic cleansing,” serving to justify military interventions and collective punishments against nations and ethnic groups considered responsible for such crimes. For this reason, in our editorial output, it would be advisable, whenever possible, to use terms that are more clearly distanced from this ideological and legal framework. Therefore, one could speak of a “war of annihilation” or a “war of extermination.” However, It is not up to us to decide what language is imposed on a vast mass of people by the enemy class the enemy class and its media machine, and there is no denying that the massacre still taking place in Gaza largely fits the definition that bourgeois law itself gives to the term “genocide”. Indiscriminate and carpet bombing, the almost total destruction of homes, the destruction or serious damage to nine out of ten hospitals with patients and medical staff inside, the frequent killing of rescue teams after bombings, the blocking of humanitarian convoys carrying medicine and food, the systematic starvation of the civilian population, the elimination of witnesses capable of communicating with the outside world from the Strip, with more than 230 journalists killed, and air strikes against personnel from UN and humanitarian organizations are all elements that justify the use of the term genocide without quotation marks. Furthermore, the environmental degradation caused by the bombing can only lead to ethnic cleansing, given that vast areas of the Gaza Strip are already uninhabitable. Some 85,000 bombs have already been dropped on Gaza, approximately 10% of which have not exploded. This means that more than 8,000 explosive devices have turned the territory into a huge minefield, the clearance of which will take a long time. The explosions have released large quantities of heavy elements such as arsenic, cadmium, mercury, and lead, which, by poisoning the soil and aquifers, will eventually enter the food chain and cause damage to the health of the inhabitants of the Gaza Strip for several decades. The destruction of water and sewage networks has already led to an exponential increase in infectious diseases. It is easy to imagine that the deportation of the Palestinian population from the Gaza Strip will one day be presented as a “humanitarian intervention”.

The massacre of the last 600 days has continued because, until now, no bourgeois force has had any interest in stopping it and, therefore, no intention of doing so. The capitalist states are not interested, starting with those in the Middle East, which have used the Palestinian question as an ideological weapon to subjugate their proletariat under the bourgeois banner and pursue their goals as regional powers. At the same time, the anti-Zionist ideology that sees the destruction or, at least, the dissolution of the State of Israel as the solution to all problems does not help the massacred masses of Gaza in any way. If today anti-Zionism means being against the existence of a Jewish state and wishing for its destruction, but at the same time not wishing for the end of all states in the region, how can this attitude be reasonably separated from pure and simple anti-Semitism?

The communist program is as far removed from Zionist statism as it is from the so-called “Palestinian Resistance” and the anti-Zionism of pro-Palestinian movements. These bourgeois and interclass movements, even when motivated by the best of intentions (to the extent that “good intentions” can exist in the realm of bourgeois ideology), do nothing but reinforce the spiral of violence against the civilian population. If Hamas today has in its statutes the obligation to kill Jews wherever they may be, to the extent that this organization is hegemonic in the so-called Palestinian resistance, this obviously prevents any rapprochement between Israeli workers and the demands of Palestinian proletarians and the perspective of a proletarian class union above nationalities. At the same time, the promise of Israel’s destruction condemns Israeli Jews, and in part the Jewish diaspora, to close ranks around Netanyahu’s infamous government in the hope of being defended from an enemy perceived, rightly or wrongly, as mortal. Israeli Jewish proletarians believe, with some justification, that they live “at home” and do not believe they should pack their bags because bourgeois movements or states that have taken up the banner of anti-Zionism have decided that Israel should not exist. The same is true of many Jews in the diaspora who believe that Israel is the only country where they do not feel like a minority because they are Jewish. It is ironic that this feeling is even more frustrating for Palestinians, who suffer from the deprivation of not having their own state and, therefore, their own country.

The communist revolution that we scientifically foresee leads us to propose no solution either for the Palestinians or for the Israelis as such, who, as long as they remain firmly attached to the idea and reality of the national state (real in the imagination even when it does not exist), will be condemned to repeat large-scale massacres against each other. Our revolution will offer a single solution to the entire working class worldwide, above and beyond differences of nationality: the overthrow of deadly bourgeois rule, the destruction of all existing capitalist states, and with that, the end of all oppression based on class, race, and nationality.

We can only reiterate our position

To the Palestinian proletariat, to the Arab proletariat, we say clearly: any nationalist path (the “two peoples, two states” solution) is a dead end, destined to prolong indefinitely the wars, suffering, and destruction.

The only way out of this hell that has lasted for eighty years will be neither easy nor quick. It requires a radical change in all the political perspectives adopted and defended until now by the “resistant” and “nationalist” bourgeois political entities.

The only perspective is communism, in theoretical and practical terms: a daily social and political struggle against the enemy class, up to the class war, in close connection with the world proletarian movement. This is the perspective that must be regained and reactivated.

Whatever the political outcome of the current carnage, the proletariat of Gaza, the West Bank, all the Arab countries involved, and the Israeli proletariat must fight together on two fronts:

• Against the Israeli bourgeoisie represented today by the Netanyahu government and the Israeli state, which has fiercely persecuted the Palestinian people for years;
• Against the Arab bourgeoisie represented today by Hamas, the PNA, and the governments of the other Arab countries, which has sacrificed the Palestinian people and its own proletariat as cannon fodder to achieve its interests and continue its international trafficking.

At the same time, it will be the task of the proletariat of the metropolises of the oldest imperialism, once it has found the path to open social conflict—without concessions and without borders, under the leadership of the international communist party—to integrate the local struggle of the Arab proletariat into the broader, more general, and decisive class war on a global scale against the bourgeoisie, for the abolition of the states, for a classless society, for communism.

June 3, 2025