More than a century of conflict in Israel/Palestine

Since 7 October 2023, the Middle East has once again been embroiled in an escalation of barbaric violence that defies all comprehension. Following the raid by hundreds of Hamas terrorists who massacred and kidnapped as many people as they could on Israeli territory, and the salvos of thousands of missiles fired from Gaza, the Israeli army's response has been devastating, with the systematic bombardment and destruction of population centres, the death of tens of thousands of people, mainly women and children, and the further displacement of the entire population of the Gaza Strip, with whole families forced to sleep in the streets. The Palestinian population is being held hostage by both Hamas and the Israeli army, with the surrounding Arab states (Egypt, Jordan) doing everything they can to prevent the displaced Palestinians from fleeing to their territories. And from Hezbollah in the north to the Houthis in the Red Sea, a creeping extension of the war threatens the whole region.

In the face of all this carnage, indignation and anger are not enough. Above all, we need to analyse and understand the historical context that led to these massacres. Behind the claims of pro-Zionist democrats about the ‘sacred right of the Jews to found and defend their State’ or the slogans of the pro-Palestinian left advocating a ‘free Palestine, from the river to the sea’, lies a mobilisation of the population of the region, and in particular the working class, with a view to multiplying the carnage for the benefit of sinister imperialist manoeuvres and confrontations that have been going on for more than a century: “The geopolitical landscape of the contemporary Middle East is incomprehensible without knowing the last hundred years of imperialist manoeuvres” (W. Auerbach, “Zionism and Marxism”, Intransigence wesbite, 2018).

As capitalism passed into its decadent epoch, marked by the outbreak of World War 1, the formation of new nation states lost any progressive function and served only to justify brutal ethnic cleansing, mass exoduses of populations and systematic discrimination against minorities. We need only recall how, almost simultaneously with the formation of the Zionist state in the late 1940s - and also as a consequence of British imperialism's double-dealing - there was a forced mass exodus of Muslims from India and Hindus from Pakistan, provoked by horrific pogroms on both sides. More recently, the break-up of Yugoslavia led to bloody civil wars and massacres. So the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, with its massacres and refugees, while it has its specific aspects, is not an exceptional evil, but a classic product of the decadence of capitalism. In this context, the internationalist position defended by the Communist Left rejects any support for a capitalist state or proto-state and the imperialist forces which support them. Today, the destruction of all capitalist states is on the agenda by a single means: international proletarian revolution. Any other ‘strategic’ or ‘tactical’ objective is a support for the murderous logic of imperialist war.

The history of the confrontation between the Jewish and Arab bourgeoisies in Palestine illustrates how the ‘national’ movements of both Jews and Arabs, while engendered by the ordeal of oppression and persecution, are inextricably intertwined with the confrontation of rival imperialisms, and how these movements have both been used to eclipse the common class interests of Arab and Jewish proletarians, leading them to slaughter each other for the interests of their exploiters.

Palestine: narrow national ambitions and imperialist manoeuvring ground

From the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, once the globe had been divided between the main European powers, the nature of imperialist conflicts took on a qualitatively new character, with increasingly open and violent confrontation between these and other powers in different parts of the world: between France and Italy in North Africa, between France and Britain in Egypt and the Sudan, between  and Russia in Central Asia, between Russia and Japan in the Far East, between Japan and Britain in China, between the United States and Japan in the Pacific, between Germany and France over Morocco, etc. From this time onwards, various powers, such as Germany, Russia and Britain, also had their sights set on parts of the declining Ottoman Empire[1].

The collapse of the Ottoman Empire after World War 1 offered no opportunitý for the creation of a great industrial nation, either in the Balkans or in the Middle East, a nation that would have beeń capable of competing on the world market. On the contrary, the pressure of confrontation between imperialisms led to fragmentation and the emergence of embryonic states. Just as the mini-states in the Balkans have remained the object of imperialist scheming right up to the present day, the Asian part of the ruins of the Ottoman Empire, the Middle East, has been and remains the theatre of permanent imperialist conflict.

Already during World War 1, taking advantage of Germany's defeat and Russia's ousting from the imperialist scene (faced with the revolutionary movement), France and Great Britain divided up the supervision of the ‘abandoned’ Arab territories between them (Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916). As a result, in April 1920, Britain received a ‘mandate’ from the League of Nations over Palestine, Transjordan, Iran and Iraq, while France received one over Syria and Lebanon. Virtually all the persistent ethno-religious conflicts we hear about in the region today - between Jews and Arabs in Israel/Palestine, Sunnis and Shiites in Yemen and Iraq, Christians and Muslims in Lebanon, Christians, Sunnis and Shiites in Syria, the Kurds in Turkish, Iranian, Iraqi and Syrian Kurdistan - can be traced back to the way the Middle East was carved up around 1920. As far as Palestine is concerned, as long as the Ottoman Empire existed, it had always been considered part of Syria. But now, with the British Mandate over Palestine, the imperialist powers were creating a new ‘entity’ separate from Syria. Like all these new ‘entities’ created during the decadence of capitalism, it was destined to become a permanent theatre of conflict and intrigue between imperialist powers.

In none of the Arab countries or protectorates did the local bourgeoisie actually have the means to set up economically and politically solid states, free from the grip of the ‘protecting’ powers, and the call for ‘national liberation’ was in reality nothing more than a reactionary demand. While Marx and Engels in the 19th century had been able to support certain national movements - on the sole condition that the formation of nation states could accelerate the growth of the working class and strengthen it so that it could act as the gravedigger of capitalism - the economic and imperialist reality in the Middle East showed that there was no longer room for the formation of a new Arab or Palestinian nation. As elsewhere in the world, once capitalism entered its phase of decline, no national faction of capital could play a progressive role, thus confirming the analysis made by Rosa Luxemburg as early as the World War 1: “The nation state, national unity and independence, such were the ideological flags under which the great bourgeois states of the heart of Europe were constituted in the last century. [...] Before extending its network over the whole globe, the capitalist economy sought to create for itself a single territory within the national limits of a state [...]. Today, (the national phrase) serves only to mask imperialist aspirations, unless it is used as a war cry in imperialist conflicts, the only and ultimate ideological means of capturing the attention of the popular masses and making them play the role of cannon fodder in imperialist wars” (Junius Pamphlet).

Weak bourgeoisies, manipulated by British imperialism

During World War 1, the two Mandatory Powers had made promises to the subjugated peoples then under the thumb of the Sultan of Istanbul. Great Britain in particular had raised hopes of independence for the Arabs, and even the formation of a great Arab nation (see the McMahon-Hussein correspondence of 1915-1916) and had succeeded in fomenting a revolt by Arab tribes against the Ottomans (co-led by T.E. Lawrence, ‘Lawrence of Arabia’). But on the other hand, for Britain, Palestine represented a strategic position between the Suez Canal and the future British Mesopotamia, vital for defending its colonial empire which was coveted by other powers. From this point of view, British power was not unsympathetic to colonisation ‘imported’ from Europe, constituting a sort of control force for the region, following the example of the Boers in South Africa or the Protestants in Ireland. Hence the Balfour Declaration of 1917, which expressed the British government's commitment to a Jewish national home in Palestine (“The establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people”). Moreover, a Jewish legion, the Zion Mule Corps, fought as part of the British army in the Middle East during World War 1. In short, ‘perfidious Albion’ was playing both sides.

At the end of the war, the situation of the Palestinian ruling class was precarious. Separated from its historic links with Syria, it was even weaker than the Arab bourgeoisies in other regions. With neither a significant industrial base nor financial capital, due to its economic backwardness, it could only rely on politico-military mobilisation to defend its interests. As early as 1919, at the first Palestinian national congress in Jerusalem, Palestinian nationalists called for Palestine to be included as “an integral part... of the independent Arab government of Syria within an Arab Union, free from all foreign influence or protection”[2] . Palestine was envisaged as part of an independent Syrian state, governed by Faysal, appointed by the Syrian National Council in March 1920 as constitutional king of Syria-Palestine: “We consider Palestine to be part of Arab Syria and it has never been separated from it at any time. We are bound by national, religious, linguistic, moral, economic and geographical borders" [3]. Demonstrations were organised throughout Palestine from 1919 onwards, and in April 1920 riots in Jerusalem left around ten people dead and almost 250 injured. However, the nationalist movement was quickly put down by the British army in Palestine, while French forces crushed the forces of the Arab kingdom of Syria in July 1920, not hesitating to use their airforce to bomb the nationalists. Already in Egypt in March 1918, demonstrations by Egyptian nationalists, but also by workers and peasants demanding social reforms, were put down by both the British army and the Egyptian army, killing more than 3,000 demonstrators. In 1920, Britain bloodily crushed a protest movement in Mosul, Iraq.

At the same time, the Palestinian ruling class, despised by its Syrian, Egyptian and Lebanese counterparts and proclaiming its autonomy in a world where there was no longer any room for a new nation state, was faced with a fresh ‘rival’ from outside. As a result of England's support for the establishment of a Jewish home in Palestine, the number of Jewish immigrants increased sharply, and England initially used the Jewish nationalists both against its main rival, France, and against the Arab nationalists. It encouraged the Zionists to argue at the League of Nations that they wanted neither French protection in Palestine (as part of ‘Greater Syria’) nor international protection, but British protection. In Palestine itself, funding from the European and American Jewish bourgeoisie enabled the settlements to expand rapidly, leading to increasingly violent clashes with the original Palestinian populations on the ground. In 1922, at the start of the British Mandate over Palestine, 85,000 of the 650,000 inhabitants of Palestine were Jewish, i.e. 12% of the population, compared with 560,000 Muslims or Christians. Following massive immigration linked to growing anti-Semitism in Central Europe and Russia - a consequence of the defeat of the world revolutionary wave in these regions - the Jewish population had more than doubled by 1931 (175,000). It was to grow by a further 250,000 between 1931 and 1936, so that by 1939 it represented 30% of the population.

The considerable increase in Jewish immigration to Palestine and the multiplication of settlements buying up Arab land and Jewish districts in the towns were exploited by the two nationalisms to heighten tensions and encourage confrontations between communities. The Palestinian peasants and workers, as well as the Jewish workers, were faced with the false alternative of taking sides with one faction or another of the bourgeoisie (Palestinian or Jewish). This was already clearly highlighted in 1931 in the review Bilan, the organ of the Italian Fraction of the Communist Left: “The expropriation of land at derisory prices has plunged́ the Arab proletarians into the blackest misery and driven them into the arms of the Arab nationalists and the large landowners and the emerging bourgeoisie. The latter obviously takes advantage of this to extend its aims of exploiting the masses and directs the discontent of the fellahs and proletarians against the Jewish workers in the same way as the Zionist capitalists have directed́ the discontent of the Jewish workers against the Arabs. From this contrast between the Jewish and Arab exploited, British imperialism and the Arab and Jewish ruling classes can only emerge strengthened.” [4] In fact, this false alternative meant enlisting workers in armed intercommunal confrontations solely in the interests of the bourgeoisie. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, anti-Jewish riots broke out all over Palestine, causing many deaths and injuries: in 1921 in Jaffa, then during the ‘massacres of 1929’ in Jerusalem, Hebron and Safed, with looting and burning of isolated Jewish villages, often completely destroyed, and reprisal attacks on Arab neighbourhoods, causing the deaths of 133 Jews and 116 Arabs.

After these riots, in the early 1930s the British played the pacification card towards the Arabs by limiting the Jewish self-defence forces, but the persistent tensions and provocations between communities led at the end of 1936 to a widespread revolt by Palestinian nationalists against the British forces and the Jewish communities, which lasted for more than three years (until the end of the winter of 1939). Faced with this explosion of Arab revolt, the Jewish community authorities initially imposed a policy of non-retaliation and restraint on the Haganah, the Jewish self-defence militia, in order to prevent an outbreak of violence. But within these self-defence forces there was a growing call for reprisals in response to the increasing number of Arab attacks. As a result, the Irgun, an armed organisation linked to the Zionist right, V. Jabotinsky's ‘Revisionist’ party, decided to launch indiscriminate reprisal attacks against the Arabs, which ultimately turned into a campaign of terror that left hundreds of Arabs dead. The Arab revolt also led the British to strengthen the Zionist paramilitary forces (development of a Jewish police force and special Jewish units - the Haganah's ‘Special Night Squads’ and the Fosh Commando).

In 1939, the Irgun split into two groups and its most radical fringe founded the Lehi (also known as the ‘Stern group’ or ‘Stern gang’), which launched a wave of attacks that also targeted the British. From the 1930s onwards, Arab insurgents tended to use guerrilla methods in rural districts and terrorist methods, such as bombings and assassinations, in urban areas. Groups, often of the jihadist type, destroyed telephone and telegraph lines and then sabotaged the Kirkuk-Haifa oil pipeline, murdering soldiers, members of the British administration and Jews. The British reacted violently, especially to acts of Arab terrorism, and took counter-terrorist action, such as razing to the ground Arab villages and neighbourhoods (as in Jaffa in August 1936).

In the end, the Arab revolt was a military failure and led to the dismantling of the Arab paramilitary forces and the arrest or exile of its leaders (including the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husseini). More than 5,000 Arabs, 300 Jews and 262 British were killed in the fighting. The revolt also led to internal confrontations between factions of the Palestinian bourgeoisie, with Amin al-Husseini's faction attacking the more moderate elements - considered to be ‘traitors’ because they were not nationalist enough for the rebels' taste and because they sold land to the Jews - and assassinating the Arab policemen who remained loyal to the British. These actions in turn set off a cycle of revenge, leading to the creation of Arab village counter-terrorism militias and the killing of at least a thousand people. At the beginning of 1939, a widespread climate of inter-clan terror prevailed among the Arab population and continued after the end of the revolt.

However, despite being defeated militarily, the Palestinian Arabs obtained major political concessions (‘White Paper’ of 1939) from the British who feared that they would be supported by Germany. Britain imposed a limit on Jewish immigration and the transfer of Arab land to Jews and promised the creation of a unitary state within ten years, in which Jews and Arabs would share the government. This proposal was rejected by the Jewish community and its paramilitary forces, who in turn launched a general revolt, temporarily frozen by the outbreak of World War 2.

Seeking the support and involvement of the imperialist powers

Too weak to act independently to establish their own nation state, both the Jewish Zionist bourgeoisie and the Palestinian Arab bourgeoisie had to seek the support of imperialist sponsors, whose interference only fanned the flames of confrontation.

Faced with the crushing by the British (and French) of the nationalist movement for a greater Syria and the influx of Jewish settlers from Europe, the Palestinian ruling factions had no choice but to turn to other imperialist powers for support against their Zionist rival. So the Mufti of Jerusalem first sought support from Mussolini's Italy, before turning in the 1930s to Nazi Germany, Britain's great rival. As early as March 1933, German officials in Turkey informed the Nazi authorities of the Mufti's support for their ‘Jewish policy’. After the failure of the Arab revolt of 1936-39 and the split with the more moderate factions within the Arab bourgeoisie, the most radical nationalist leaders, including the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, went into exile and chose the camp of Nazi Germany on the eve of World War 2. After taking part in the 1941 Iraqi uprising, fomented by Germany against the British, the Mufti ended up taking refuge in Italy and Nazi Germany in the hope of obtaining from them the independence of the Arab states.

In the case of the Jewish ruling factions, the situation was more complex, insofar as policy differences emerged between the left and centre factions on the one hand and the ‘Revisionist’ right on the other. The World Zionist Organisation, dominated by the left in alliance with the centrists, chose to maintain fairly good relations with the British (at least until 1939) and to officially endorse the objective of a ‘Jewish National Home’ without expressing an opinion on the question of independence or autonomy under the British mandate[5]. The irredentist right, represented by the Revisionist Party and the Irgun, on the other hand, immediately demanded independence and therefore distanced itself from the British.

In line with this, the charismatic leader of the ultra-nationalist right, Vladimir Jabotinsky, maintained in the second half of the 1930s cordial relations with dictatorial and even anti-Semitic regimes such as the Polish and Italian fascist authorities, in order to put pressure on the British. In 1936, the Polish government launched a large-scale anti-Jewish campaign and encouraged Jewish emigration. When he officially stated in 1938 that he wanted ‘a substantial reduction in the number of Jews in Poland’[6], Vladimir Jabotinsky decided to commit the Revisionist Party to supporting the authoritarian Polish government, which made no secret of its virulent anti-Semitism. His aim was to try and convince the government to channel the Jews expelled from Poland to Palestine. The revisionists' collaboration with Poland also had a military dimension: arms and money were given to the Irgun and Irgun officers received military and sabotage training in Poland. The Revisionist faction also had an openly fascist wing, first embodied in the Birionim group (a Zionist fascist group founded in 1931 by radicals from the Revisionist party) which openly sympathised with Mussolini, and after the latter's demise in 1943, it continued to exist through certain militants, such as Avraham Stern, an Irgun leader in the second half of the 1930s and founder of Lehi, who was sympathetic to the European fascist regimes and made contact with Nazi Germany. For this fascist wing of Revisionism, Germany was undoubtedly an ‘adversary’ but the British occupier was the real ‘enemy’ preventing the establishment of a Jewish state!

The implacable logic of imperialism in decadent capitalism was bound to drive the various bourgeois factions in Palestine to seek the support of foreign powers and could only promote a multiplication of imperialist intrigues. Thus, the Zionist movement only became a realistic project after receiving the Machiavellian support of British imperialism, which hoped by this means to gain better control of the region. But Britain, while supporting the Zionist project, was also playing a double game: it had to take account of the very large Arab-Muslim component in its colonial empire and had therefore made all sorts of promises to the Arab population of Palestine and the rest of the region. As for the ‘Arab liberation’ movement, while it opposed Britain's support for Zionism, it was in no way anti-imperialist, any more than were the Zionist factions who were prepared to attack Britain, since they all sought the support of other imperialist powers, such as triumphant American imperialism, fascist Italy or Nazi Germany.

In a capitalism historically in decline and dominated by the growing barbarity of murderous imperialist confrontations, the only perspective to be defended by revolutionaries was the one already defended by Bilan in 1930-1931: “For the true revolutionary, naturally, there is no ‘Palestinian’ question, but only the struggle of all the exploited of the Near East, Arabs or Jews included, which is part of the more general struggle of all the exploited of the whole world for communist revolution” [7]. For the Arab and Jewish proletarians of Palestine, trapped in the nets of the ‘liberation of the nation’, the 1920s and 1930s were grim years of terror, massacres and permanent fear under riots, attacks, reprisals and counter-reprisals by barbaric bands and nationalist terrorists on both sides.

The founding of the State of Israel, a product of the new imperialist order after the Second World War

The Zionist organisations had categorically rejected the guidelines of the new British plan (‘White Paper’ of 1939), which involved limiting Jewish immigration and the transfer of Arab land to Jews, as well as the creation of a unitary state within ten years. After World War 2, this opposition led to a head-on confrontation with the Mandatory Power. The British introduced a naval blockade of Palestinian ports to prevent new Jewish immigrants from entering ‘Mandatory’ Palestine, hoping in this way to appease the Palestinian Arab bourgeoisie. For their part, the Zionists used the world's sympathy and compassion for the fate of the thousands of refugees who had escaped the Nazi concentration camps to put pressure on the British and force the doors of Palestine open to all immigrants.

By 1945, however, the balance of imperialist power had shifted: the United States had consolidated its position at the expense of Britain which, bled dry by the war and on the verge of bankruptcy, had become a debtor to the Americans. So, from 1942 onwards, the Zionist organisations turned to the United States to obtain support for their project to create a Jewish homeland in Palestine. In November, the Jewish Emergency Council, meeting in New York, rejected the British White Paper of 1939 and formulated as its primary demand the transformation of Palestine into an independent Zionist state, which ran directly counter to British interests. As the main beneficiaries of the fall of the Ottoman Empire after World War 1, France and Britain now found themselves overtaken by American and Soviet imperialism, both of which aimed to reduce the colonial influence of the former top dogs. The USSR offered its support to any movement inclined to weaken English domination and, as a result, supplied arms to the Zionist guerrillas via Czechoslovakia. The United States, the main victor of World War 2, was also keen to reduce the influence of the ‘proxy’ countries in the Middle East and gave arms and money to the Zionists as they fought their British war ally.

As soon as the UN voted on a plan to partition Palestine at the end of November 1947, clashes between Jewish Zionist organisations and Palestinian Arabs intensified, while the British, who were supposed to guarantee security, unilaterally organised their withdrawal and only intervened occasionally. In all the mixed areas where the two communities lived, in Jerusalem and Haifa in particular, attacks, reprisals and counter-reprisals became increasingly violent. Isolated shootings evolved into pitched battles; attacks on traffic turned into ambushes. There were increasingly bloody incidents, which were in turn met with riots, reprisals and other attacks.

The Jewish armed organisations launched a new, intensive and particularly deadly bombing campaign against the British and also the Arabs. On 12 December 1947, the Irgun detonated a car bomb in Jerusalem, killing 20 people. On 4 January 1948, the Lehi blew up a lorry outside Jaffa town hall, which housed the headquarters of an Arab paramilitary militia, killing 15 people and injuring 80, 20 of them seriously. On 18 February, an Irgun bomb exploded in Ramalah market, killing 7 people and injuring 45. On 22 February, in Jerusalem, Amin al-Husseini's men organised a triple car bomb attack with the help of British deserters, targeting the offices of The Palestine Post newspaper, the market on Ben Yehuda street and the backyard of the Jewish Agency offices, killing 22, 53 and 13 Jews respectively and injuring hundreds. Finally, the massacre of villagers at Deir Yassin on 9 April, committed by the Irgun and the Lehi, left between 100 and 120 dead. The campaign culminated on 17 September 1948 in Jerusalem, when a Lehi commando assassinated Count Folke Bernadotte, the United Nations mediator for Palestine, and the head of the UN military observers, French Colonel Sérot. Over the two months of December 1947 and January 1948, almost a thousand people were killed and two thousand wounded. At the end of March, a report put the figure at over two thousand dead and four thousand wounded.

From January onwards, under the indifferent eye of the British, the civil war between the communities led to operations that took an increasingly military turn. Armed Arab militias entered Palestine to support the Palestinian militias and attack Jewish settlements and villages. For its part, the Haganah mounted more and more offensive operations aimed at opening up Jewish areas by driving out Arab militias, destroying Arab villages, massacring inhabitants and causing hundreds of thousands of others to flee (in total, during this period and during the Arab-Israeli war that followed the declaration of the founding of the State of Israel, almost 750,000 Arab Palestinians fled their villages). The Arab countries were preparing to enter Palestine to supposedly ‘defend their Palestinian brothers’.

On 15 May 1948, the British Mandate over Palestine came to an end and the State of Israel was proclaimed on the same day in Tel Aviv. Less than 24 hours later, Egypt, Syria, Jordan and Iraq launched an invasion. The war, which lasted until March 1949, cost the lives of more than 6,000 Jewish soldiers and civilians, 10,000 Palestinian Arab soldiers and around 5,000 soldiers from the various Arab military contingents.

If the Palestinian bourgeoisie had been incapable of creating its own state at the time of the disappearance of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War 1, the proclamation of the State of Israel by the Zionists necessarily implied that this new state could only survive by transforming its economy into a permanent war machine, by strangling its neighbours, by terrorising and displacing the majority of the Palestinian population and above all by seeking imperialist support. Faced with the former ‘protector’ power, Great Britain, which initially opposed the formation of an Israeli state so as not to damage its position towards the Arab world, the new state was able to rely on the United States, which immediately supported the creation of the State of Israel, and on the USSR, which hoped that the formation of an Israeli state would weaken British imperialism in the region.

The Palestinian nationalists, unable to stand alone against the newly-founded State of Israel, also had to seek support among the State's enemies, such as the bourgeoisies of neighbouring Jordan, Syria, Egypt and Iraq, who were sending their troops against Israel. This war, the first of half a dozen wars and numerous military operations against its neighbours in which Israel had participated since 1948, lasted from May 1948 to March 1949. Because of the poor equipment of the Arab troops, the Israeli forces managed to repel the offensive and not only retain but even expand the territories allocated to the Zionists by the British before 1947. Beyond the grand declarations of solidarity, the neighbouring Arab bourgeoisies above all played their own imperialist cards in ‘coming to the aid of their Palestinian brothers’. Not only did Jordan occupy the West Bank and Egypt the Gaza Strip after the first Arab-Israeli war in 1948, but the Arab states also tried in the following years to get their hands on the various wings of the Palestinian nationalists. Shortly after its creation in 1964, Saudi Arabia began to finance the PLO; Egypt also tried to get hold of Fatah (the PLO's political movement); Syria created the As-Saiqa group and Iraq supported the ALF (Arab Liberation Front created in 1969). Despite all the fine speeches about the ‘united Arab nation’, the bourgeoisies of the various Arab countries were and are in fierce competition with each other and do not hesitate to use and if necessary sacrifice the Palestinian population for their own sordid interests.

Palestine at the forefront of the confrontations between the imperialist blocs

Since the day it was founded, the State of Israel has not only been enmeshed in ongoing bilateral conflicts with Palestinian Arabs and its Arab neighbours, but these clashes have always been part of the dynamics of global imperialist confrontation: Israel’s strategic position places it at the centre of regional tensions in the Middle East, but also and above all at the heart of global confrontations between major imperialist sharks. From the end of the 1950s onwards, the State of Israel played the role of vanguard for the American bloc in the region.

The start of the Cold War between the American bloc and the Soviet bloc put the Middle East at the centre of imperialist rivalries. After the Korean War (1950-53), which was the first major confrontation between the two blocs, the Cold War intensified and Russian imperialism tried to increase its influence in the countries of the ‘Third World’, which gave the Middle East increasing importance for the leaders of the two blocs. Although initially the tensions in the region mainly enabled the United States to ‘discipline’ its European allies by preventing them from pursuing their own imperialist interests too intensively (the 1956 Franco-British operation in Suez and the Israeli-Egyptian war), the conflict in the Middle East then evolved over the next 35 years in the context of East-West confrontation, with Palestine as a central theatre of confrontation.

The 1948 war was only the beginning of an endless cycle of military conflicts. From the 1950s onwards, faced with the inability of the Arab League troops to defeat their much smaller but better organised and armed enemy, an arms race began, during which Israel received massive deliveries of weapons from the United States, and the Arab rivals turned to Soviet imperialism, which persistently tried to gain a foothold in the region by supporting Arab nationalism: Egypt, Syria and Iraq, which temporarily united to form the United Arab Republic, became for a time allies of the Eastern bloc, which also supported the Palestinian fedayeen and the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) in Palestine. In 1968, the various Palestinian resistance movements came together under the aegis of Arafat. In the context of the Cold War, with Israel a major ally of the United States, the PLO had to turn to the USSR and its ‘Arab brothers’. However, behind the grand speeches about the ‘unity of the Arab people’, the Arab states once again committed their troops not only against Israel, but also against the Palestinian nationalists, who often act as a disruptive force within these states. They have never hesitated to commit massacres similar to those committed by the Israeli bourgeoisie against Palestinian refugees. In 1970, during ‘Black September’, 30,000 Palestinians were killed in Jordan by the Jordanian army. In September 1982, Lebanese Christian militias, with Israel's tacit agreement, entered two Palestinian camps at Sabra and Shatila and massacred 10,000 civilians.

These attempts by the Eastern bloc to gain a foothold in the region met with strong opposition from the United States and the Western bloc, which made the State of Israel one of the spearheads of their policy. US support for Israel has been a permanent feature of all the conflicts in the region, as has Germany's financial support[8]. This support is not essentially due to the considerable weight of the Jewish electorate in the United States or to the influence of the ‘Zionist lobby’ on American political leaders. Although Israel does not have significant oil resources or other important raw materials, the country is of major strategic importance to the United States because of its geographical position. Moreover, in its confrontation with a series of local imperialist powers, Israel is financially and militarily totally dependent on the United States, so that Israel's imperialist interests have forced it to seek Uncle Sam’s protection. In short, until 1989, the United States could always count on Israel as its armed wing. Moreover, in the series of wars with its Arab rivals - most of whom were equipped with Russian weapons - the Israeli army was a testbed for American weapons.

At the end of the 1970s and during the 1980s, the American bloc gradually secured overall control of the Middle East, reducing the influence of the Soviet bloc, even though the fall of the Shah and the ‘Iranian revolution’ in 1979 not only deprived the American bloc of an important bastion but also heralded, through the coming to power of the retrograde mullah regime, the spread of the decomposition of capitalism. The aim of this offensive by the American bloc was “to complete the encirclement of the USSR, to strip that country of any positions it may have held outside its direct glacis. The priority of this offensive is the definitive expulsion of the USSR from the Middle East, the bringing to heel of Iran and the reintegration of this country into the American bloc as an important part of its strategic system"[9] In this offensive policy of the Western bloc, Israel played a key role in the Arab-Israeli wars of 1967 (‘Six-Day War’) and 1973 (‘Yom Kippur War’), the bombing and destruction of a nuclear reactor in Baghdad in 1981 and the invasion of Lebanon in 1982. Israel's military action, combined with economic and military pressure from the American bloc, led to the defeat of the Eastern bloc allies in the region, the shift of Egypt and then Iraq to the Western bloc, and a sharp reduction in Syria's control over Lebanon.

However, strengthened by the easing of tensions with Egypt, in July 1980 the Israeli bourgeoisie reaffirmed the transfer of its national capital from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and the incorporation of the Old City of Jerusalem (formerly Jordan) into Israeli territory. Also from this time, the Israeli government decided to step up Jewish colonisation of the West Bank. This exacerbated tensions between the Israeli and Palestinian bourgeoisies and, from 1987 in particular, the spiral of violence escalated sharply. The signal was given by the first Intifada (or ‘uprising’) in 1987. In response to increasing repression by the Israeli army in the West Bank and Gaza, the Intifada led to a massive campaign of civil disobedience, strikes and demonstrations. Hailed by leftists as a model of revolutionary struggle, it was always entirely set within the national and imperialist framework of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

If the first half́ of the 20th century in the Middle East showed́ that national liberation had become impossible and that all factions of the local bourgeoisies were subservient in the global conflicts waged between them by the great imperialist sharks, the formation of the State of Israel in 1948 marked́ nearly forty years of another period of bloody confrontations, inscribed in the merciless confrontation between the Eastern and Western blocs. More than seventy years of conflict in the Middle East have illustrated irrefutably that the decaying capitalist system has nothing to offer but wars and massacres and that the proletariat cannot benefit from choosing one imperialist camp over another.

Palestine at the centre of the irrational dynamic of destruction and massacre in the Middle East

After the implosion of the Soviet bloc at the end of 1989, the 1990s were marked by the spectacular expansion of manifestations of the period of capitalism's rotting on its feet, its decomposition, and in this context, the ‘Report on imperialist tensions’ of the 20th Congress of the ICC noted in 2013: “The Middle East is a terrible confirmation of our analyses about the impasse of the system and the flight into ‘every man for himself’”. It is a striking illustration of the central characteristics of this period:
- The explosion of the imperialist ‘every man for himself’ is manifested in the all-out expression of the hegemonic appetites of a multitude of states. Iran has expressed its imperialist ambitions, first in Iraq by supporting the Shiite militias which dominate a fragmented state apparatus, then in Syria by supporting at arm's length the regime of Bashar al Assad when it was on the verge of being swept away by the revolt of the Sunni majority. Through its allies - from Lebanese Hezbollah to the Yemeni Houthis - Teheran has established itself as a formidable regional power. But Turkey - with its interventions in Iraq and Syria - Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, present in Yemen, Libya and Egypt, and even Qatar, the base camp of groups linked to the Muslim Brotherhood, are not hiding their imperialist ambitions.
- The murderous reactions of the American superpower to counter the decline of its domination led to two bloody wars in the Middle East (Operation Desert Storm by Bush senior in 1991 and Operation Iraqi Freedom by Bush junior in 2003), which in the end only resulted in more chaos and barbarism.
- The terrifying chaos resulting from bloody civil wars (Syria, Yemen, Libya, Sudan) has led to the collapse of state structures, fragmented and failed states (Iraq, Lebanon), traumatised populations and millions of refugees.

In this dynamic of growing confrontation in the Middle East, the State of Israel has played a key role. As the Americans' first lieutenant in the region, Tel Aviv was destined to be the keystone of a pacified region through the Oslo and Jericho-Gaza agreements of 1993, one of the greatest successes of American diplomacy in the region. These agreements granted the Palestinians the beginnings of autonomy and thus integrated them into the regional order conceived by Uncle Sam. However, in the second half of the 1990s, following the failure of the Israeli invasion of southern Lebanon, the ‘hard’ Israeli right came to power (the first Netanyahu government from 1996 to 1999) against the wishes of the American government, which had supported Shimon Peres. From then on, the Right did everything it could to sabotage the peace process with the Palestinians:
- through the extension of settlements on the West Bank and support for settlers who were becoming increasingly arrogant and violent: as early as February 1994, a Jewish terrorist, a settler belonging to the racist movement created by Rabbi Meir Kahane, massacred 29 Muslims in the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron; in November 1995, a young religious Zionist assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin;
- through secret support for Hamas and its terrorist attacks in order to undermine the authority of the PLO and pursue a policy of ‘divide and rule’, justifying increasing supervision of the Palestinian territories.

Opposition leader Ariel Sharon's provocative visit to the Temple Mount in September 2000 resulted in a second Intifada, which saw a sharp increase in suicide attacks against Israelis. By the same token, the unilateral dismantling of the settlements in Gaza by the Sharon government in 2004 was in no way a conciliatory gesture, as Israeli propaganda presented it, but on the contrary the product of a cynical calculation to freeze negotiations on a political settlement of the conflict: the withdrawal from Gaza “means freezing the political process. And when you freeze that process, you prevent the creation of a Palestinian state and any discussion about refugees, borders and Jerusalem” [10]. Moreover, since Islamists reject the existence of a Jewish state in Islamic lands, just as messianic Zionists reject the existence of a Palestinian state in the land of Israel, given by God to the Jews, these two factions are therefore objective allies in sabotaging the ‘two-state solution’. The right-wing sections of the Israeli bourgeoisie have also done everything in their power to strengthen the influence and resources of Hamas, insofar as this organisation was, like them, totally opposed to the Oslo Accords: in 2006, Prime Ministers Sharon and Olmert forbade the Palestinian Authority from deploying an additional police battalion to Gaza to oppose Hamas and authorised Hamas to present candidates in the 2006 elections. When Hamas staged a coup in Gaza in 2007 to ‘eliminate the Palestinian Authority’ and establish their absolute power, the Israeli government refused to support the Palestinian police. As for the Qatari financial funds that Hamas needed to be able to govern, the Hebrew state allowed them to be regularly transferred to Gaza under the protection of the Israeli police.

Israel's strategy was clear: Gaza given to Hamas, the Palestinian Authority weakened, with limited power in the West Bank. Netanyahu himself openly promoted this policy: “Anyone who wants to thwart the creation of a Palestinian state must support the strengthening of Hamas and transfer money to Hamas. This is part of our strategy”. [11] The State of Israel and Hamas, at different times and with different means, are sinking into the worst kind of totally irrational policy, which inevitably accelerated the cycle of violence and counter-violence that led to today's atrocious massacres. In fact, the current butchery in Gaza is the continuation of a whole series of attacks and counter-attacks carried out by Hamas and the Israeli army:
- June 2006: Hamas captures Gilad Shalit, an Israeli army conscript, during a cross-border raid from Gaza, which provokes Israeli air raids and incursions.
- December 2008: Israel launches a 22-day military offensive in Gaza after rockets are fired at the town of Sderot, in southern Israel. Around 1,400 Palestinians and 13 Israelis are killed before a ceasefire is agreed.
- November 2012: Israel kills Hamas chief of staff Ahmad Jabari, followed by eight days of Israeli air raids on Gaza.
- July/August 2014: The kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teenagers by Hamas triggers a seven-week war.

Deprived of a traditional state structure and the financial resources to build a structured army capable of competing with the Tsahal (the national military of the State of Israel), the Palestinian bourgeoisie has always had to resort to terrorist attacks, as did the Zionists before the proclamation of the State of Israel. From the outset, the PLO applied terrorist tactics which were bound to cause the greatest number of civilian casualties, such as kidnappings, liquidations, hijacking of aircraft and attacks on sports teams (massacre of the Israeli Olympic team at the Munich Olympics in 1972). Since then, suicide attacks have multiplied. Committed by desperate young Palestinians, they are not aimed at military targets, but simply at spreading terror among Israeli civilians in discotheques, supermarkets and buses. They are the expression of a total impasse, of despair and hatred. The massacres of 7 October 2023 are a continuation of this policy, but at an even higher level of brutality and destruction.

The current terrifying drift must also be seen as a continuation of the irresponsible policy pursued by the populist Trump in the region. In line with the priority given to containing Iran, Trump pushed a strategy of unconditional support for Israel’s right wing, providing the Hebrew state and its respective leaders with pledges of unwavering support on all fronts including the supply of the latest military equipment, recognition of East Jerusalem as the capital and of Israeli sovereignty over the Syrian Golan Heights. This orientation supported the abandoning the Oslo Accords and the ‘two-state’ (Israeli and Palestinian) solution in the ‘Holy Land’.

The cessation of American aid to the Palestinians and the PLO and the negotiation of the ‘Abraham Accords’ - a proposal for a ‘big deal’ involving the abandonment of any claim to create a Palestinian state and the annexation by Israel of large parts of Palestine in exchange for ‘giant’ American economic aid - were essentially aimed at facilitating the de facto rapprochement between the US’s Saudi and Israeli henchmen: “For the Gulf monarchies, Israel is no longer the enemy. This grand alliance started a long time ago behind the scenes, but has not yet been played out. The only way for the Americans to move in the desired direction is to obtain the green light from the Arab world, or rather from its new leaders, MBZ (Emirates) and MBS (Arabia), who share the same strategic vision for the Gulf, for whom Iran and political Islam are the main threats. In this vision, Israel is no longer an enemy, but a potential regional partner with whom it will be easier to counter Iranian expansion in the region. [...] For Israel, which for years has been seeking to normalise its relations with the Sunni Arab countries, the equation is simple: it is a question of seeking Israeli-Arab peace, without necessarily achieving peace with the Palestinians. For their part, the Gulf States have lowered their demands on the Palestinian issue. This ‘ultimate plan’ [...] seems to aspire to establish a new reality in the Middle East. A reality based on the Palestinians accepting their defeat, in exchange for a few billion dollars, and where Israelis and Arab countries, mainly from the Gulf, could finally form a new alliance, supported by the United States, to counter the threat of the expansion of a modern Persian empire”. [12]

However, as we pointed out back in 2019, these agreements, which were a pure provocation at both the international level (abandoning international agreements and UN resolutions) and regionally, could only reactivate the unresolved Palestinian issue, a situation seized upon by all the regional imperialists (Iran of course, but also Turkey and even Egypt) and used against the United States and its allies. What's more, they only emboldened Israel’s own annexationist appetites and intensified confrontations, for example with Iran: “Neither Israel, hostile to the strengthening of Hezbollah in Lebanon and Syria, nor Saudi Arabia can tolerate this Iranian advance” [13]. The Abraham Accords irrevocably sowed the seeds of the current tragedy in Gaza.

The headlong rush of the right-wing factions of the Israeli bourgeoisie in power - more specifically the successive Netanyahu governments from 2009 to the present day - to follow their own imperialist policy is more and more openly opposed to the interests of the most responsible factions in Washington and is a caricature of the gangrene of decomposition eating away at the political apparatus of the bourgeoisie. The opposition between the different political factions in Israel over the policy to be pursued - the clashes between Netanyahu and his Minister of Defence or the chiefs of the Tsahal, the open confrontation between Netanyahu and the current American administration over the conduct of the war - induce a significant dose of uncertainty and irrationality over the outcome of the current phase of the conflict, all the more so as the shadow of a possible return of Trump to the US presidency hangs over the Middle East, which would give carte blanche to Israeli war policies and thus put an end to any hope of the United States imposing some form of stability in the region.

Nationalism leads the Middle East working class to slaughter

Once again, it is the working class that has suffered most from the consequences of the imperialist policies of the ruling classes. Israeli and Palestinian workers are constantly faced with the daily terror of Palestinian terrorist attacks and Israeli army raids and air strikes. While the endless terror unleashed by their ruling classes has created deep distress among most workers, the nationalism of their rulers also poisons their spirits. The ruling classes on both sides do everything to stir up nationalism and hatred against each other.

In material terms, workers on both sides of the imperialist conflict suffer enormously from the crushing weight of militarisation. Israeli workers are conscripted for 30 months (men) and 24 months (women). The weight of the Israeli war economy has increased the misery of Israeli workers. Palestinian workers, if they are lucky enough to find a job, receive very low wages. Over 80% of the population lives in extreme poverty. The only prospect for most of their children is to fall victim to Israeli bullets and bulldozers. And if they protest against their fate, the Palestinian Authority and the Hamas police are ready to crack down on them.

A century of imperialist conflict around Israel has shown that neither Israeli nor Palestinian workers can gain anything by supporting their own bourgeoisie. While the Israeli state has survived only through terror and destruction, the creation of a Palestinian state proper would only mean a new graveyard for Israeli and Palestinian workers. So this call for a Palestinian state is a totally reactionary slogan which communists must reject.

It is absolutely vital for communists to be clear about the perspectives of the working class. While all the leftists presented the Intifada of 1987 and those that followed as social revolts that could lead to liberation, in reality these struggles were only expressions of despair, the flames being lit by the nationalists. In all these confrontations with the Israeli state, the Palestinian workers are not fighting for their class interests but serve only as cannon fodder for their nationalist Palestinian leaders.

On the other hand, there have been occasional combative reactions by Palestinian workers fighting for their class interests - in 2007 and again in 2015, public sector workers in Gaza went on strike against the Hamas administration over unpaid wages. The same is true in Israel, with a history of strikes against the rising cost of living, such as that of dockers in 2018 and nursery workers in 2021. In 2011, during the demonstrations and assemblies protesting the housing crisis in Israel, there were even tentative signs of Israeli and Palestinian workers coming together to discuss their common interests. But again and again, the return to military conflict has tended to stifle these elementary expressions of class struggle.

Communists need to be clear about the nature and effect of nationalism in stoking up daily violence. But in addition, we have seen how campaigns to support one side or the other in the recent conflict have created real divisions in the working class in the centres of capitalism. Precisely at a time when the working class is emerging from years of passivity and resignation, the streets of the cities in the countries central to the system have been taken over by demonstrations for a free Palestine or ‘against anti-Semitism’ which loudly call on workers to abandon their class interests and take sides in an imperialist war.

While the Jewish population of Europe was one of the main victims of the Nazi genocidal regime, the policy of the Israeli state shows that these barbaric crimes are not a question of race or ethnic or religious affiliation. No faction of the bourgeoisie has a monopoly on ethnic cleansing, population displacement, terror and the annihilation of entire ethnic groups. In reality, the ‘defence mechanisms’ of the Israeli state and the Palestinian methods of warfare are an integral part of the bloody barbarism practised by all regimes in rotting capitalism.

R. Havanais / 15.07.2024

 

[1] See ‘Notes on the history of imperialist conflicts in the Middle East, Part 1’, International Review 115, 2003.

[2] ‘ From Wars to Nakbeh: Developments in Bethlehem, Palestine, 1917-1949, Adnan A. Musallam “ [archive of 19 July 2011] (accessed 29 May 2012)

[3] Meir Litvak, Palestinian Collective Memory and National Identity, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009

[4] Bilan 31 & 32, June-July 1936: See ‘Bilan and the Arab-Jewish Conflict in Palestine’ International Review 110, 2002.

[5 ] Independence was not officially claimed until May 1942, at the Biltmore Conference.

[6] Political programme of OZON, the party in power in Poland, May 1938, reported in Marius Schatner, Histoire de la droite israélienne, Éditions Complexe, 1991, page 140.

[7] Bilan No. 31 (June-July 1936), ibid

[8] Shortly after the creation of Israel, Germany began to support it financially with an annual ‘compensation fund’ of DM 1 billion.

[9] ‘Resolution on the International Situation, 6th ICC Congress’, International Review No. 44, 1986.

[10] Dov Weissglas, close adviser to Prime Minister Sharon, in the daily Haaretz, 8 October 2004. Quoted in Ch. Enderlin, ‘L'erreur stratégique d'Israël’, Le Monde diplomatique, January 2024.

[11] Netanyahu told Likud MPs on 11 March 2019, as reported in the Israeli daily Haaretz on 9 October.

[12 ] Extract from the Lebanese daily L'Orient-Le Jour, 18 June 2019.

[13] ‘23rd International Congress the ICC, Resolution on the international situation (2019)’, International Review 164, 2019.