Palestine and internationalist solidarity

One year after 7 October, the Palestinian genocide has become just another scene of the everyday life that imperialism has to offer to humanity. In the face of this barbarity, all conscious workers must ask themselves what their role is towards the liberation of Palestine, and what internationalist solidarity means. During this time, we have witnessed the emergence of a solidarity movement hegemonized by social-pacifist conceptions, based on putting pressure on imperialist states and appealing to them as legitimate interlocutors for the purpose of solving the Palestinian question, which consequently leads to legalism and possibilism. This pragmatic logic ends up colluding with the farce of the two-state solution—the same peaceful coexistence recently advocated by Pedro Sánchez in his meeting with jailer Mahmoud Abbas. The complicity they both share in the Palestinian extermination demonstrates the actual meaning of this program—the nature of the colonial oppression exercised by Israel makes its very existence incompatible with Palestinian national emancipation, debunking the illusion of a peaceful resolution of the conflict.

The Zionist state is a stronghold of worldwide reaction, indissociable from the interests of the Western monopoly bourgeoisie. Acting as a transmission belt for the United States in the Middle East, it is grafted onto Palestine like a parasite, colonizing the territory under an extermination plan. As an irreplaceable link in the imperialist chain, its reactionary character is of even greater consequence, as it serves to reinforce its own economic and military structure—as showcased by the Abraham Accords. The Spanish state is not left out of these pacts among cannibals, cooperating with the Zionist intelligence agencies for the sake of internal and external repression. Israel, expressly created as a defense line of imperialism, feeds off the war of extermination against the peoples, as shown by the new phase of war directed at Lebanon. The way the most far-right reaction salutes Zionism is not a casual coincidence, as the ethnic-nationalist ideology of the latter fans the flames of racism—especially anti-Arab racism—, sowing mistrust among the peoples and discord among the exploited. However, amidst this ocean of reaction, the Palestinian struggle evokes some powerful lessons for the fight against imperialism.

In this era of impasse between two Cycles of the World Proletarian Revolution (WPR), the Palestinian national liberation movement reminds us that, in spite of everything, imperialism is a paper tiger that can be militarily defeated. Faced with the technological superiority of the Israeli forces, a political line capable of mobilizing masses can flood its defenses and resist, as both 7 October and the ongoing insurgency against Zionist terrorism respectively demonstrate. All of this is a particular expression of a more general principle of class struggle: that every class needs a military line in order to defend its interests and goals. Keeping this in mind is a must for any sort of emancipation movement. The struggle of the Palestinian worker and peasant masses against Zionist fascism is counted among the heroic deeds in the history of the oppressed peoples; however, the bourgeois character of the Palestinian national liberation movement imposes objective limits on its just struggle for self-determination, because the particular conditions of this national oppression, with the colonial metropolis built on top of its territory, demand the destruction of the Zionist state by military means. And, for the fulfillment of this program, the premises on which the movement is based must be different from the ones that are currently hegemonical in those lands—the movement must be grounded in an independent, internationalist political line, since the only realistic horizon for the true resolution of the Palestinian question is the revolution of a new type led by the proletariat. The condition for this revolution is the creation of the Communist Party, so that it, with the backing of the classes oppressed by imperialism, develops the line of People’s War for the destruction of the Zionist state and the construction of the base areas of a democratic, unitary and internationalist republic from the river to the sea.

Nevertheless, a direct, immediate transformation of the national resistance into a revolutionary war is not possible. We must then pose the following question: what can we do from here to turn that horizon into reality? What should true proletarian solidarity with the masses crushed by imperialism in the Middle East translate into? If there is no continuity between resistance and revolution, then true internationalism requires us to contribute to the creation of an internationalist revolutionary movement, whose foundation stone is the reconstitution of communism. Decades of liquidation of the revolutionary consciousness of the proletariat nullified its capacity to act as an independent subject, thus putting an end to the October Cycle. This liquidation has taken place at a historical, general, and international level, which means that overcoming the state of subordination of the proletariat requires extracting the universal lessons from its experience by means of the Summation of the Cycle. In other words, the first requirement of any revolutionary enterprise led by the proletariat, including the effective national liberation of Palestine, is the reconstitution of the revolutionary worldview of our class and the General Line of the WPR. Therefore, reconstituting communism is the best exercise of internationalist solidarity that we can offer to the Palestinian people—it is from this perspective that we can integrate the lessons drawn from their struggle against imperialism and collaborate on its defense and promotion. And this process must unquestionably incorporate the two-line struggle against social-chauvinism, social-pacifism, and any other form of reformism within the working-class movement, because they are all part of the wall obstructing the national liberation of Palestine.