Palestine: Catastrophe and Return

Those who lived through better times once wrote about how, in times of revolution, the density of class struggle makes days contain months and weeks contain years. Unfortunately, this physical law of class struggle is also in effect in times of general counter-revolution, when the contradictions that govern class society reach such a degree of concentration that—with the revolutionary proletariat out of the picture—the smallest detonation may start a chain reaction leading to an apocalyptic imperialist slaughter, such as the Third World War looming over us today. We live on a volcano… and within it lies a fathomless ammunition dump filled with nuclear warheads. Thus, the breakneck pace of the current decade, already hastened by the imperialist war in Ukraine, has been further exacerbated by the terrorist state of Israel shifting gears regarding its colonial existence in Palestine. Since the 7th of October, the Zionists have murdered at least 14,000 Palestinians (not counting the 7,000 lying among the rubble) and forcibly displaced 1.7 million—more than 3/4 of the population crammed in the Gaza Strip ghetto, militarily sieged since 2005. The land invasion of this ghetto by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) started on the 27th of October, after twenty days dropping 18,000 tonnes of explosives on top of the Arabs. Three weeks later, the IDF tore Gaza City apart from the rest of the Strip and, after taking its port, completed the operational encirclement of the capital, beginning the all-out attack on the city center on the 17th of November. In order to defeat a terrorist organization confined within 360 km2, the Zionist state has mobilized 360,000 reservists and emitted an emergency order to arm its citizens, among which 120,000 pogromists have stepped forward to take part in the purge. Tel-Aviv, consistent with its constituent premises as a Jewish state, is carrying out an ethnic cleansing of colossal proportions, in the same vein as the 1948 Nakba.

The barbarity of the Palestinian Catastrophe is a link which allows us to grasp the chain of the general structure of contemporary imperialism. The continuity between this crisis and its potential transformation into a great regional-scale war of unforeseeable consequences is proof of this by itself. On the other hand, after the end of the October Cycle, the possibility of the Return (the national liberation of Palestine, inseparable from the destruction of the Zionist state) must inevitably involve reconstituting the universal elements of the General Line of the World Proletarian Revolution (WPR), apprehending how its objective requirements are expressed in the specific class struggle conditions in which the proletarian vanguard of every country must act. It is on these premises that we will approach the war of national resistance that the Palestinians are waging—an anti-imperialist struggle that communists from all around the world must support. In the case of the proletariat in the Spanish state, this support is indivisible from the denouncement of the role which our ruling class is fulfilling in this massacre, that is, the active military support of Israel: not only by deploying a warship (frigate Méndez Núñez) to ride along with the Yankee 6th Fleet, but also by continuously commanding the imperialist troops which—under the UN flag—are part of the defense architecture of the Zionist regime at the so-called Blue Line.

The Palestinian ghetto versus the Zionist Reich

On the 7th of October, the Zionist state suffered an unprecedented setback when a guerrilla force carried out a massive raid into its territory, overcoming its border defenses at several spots and advancing over the towns left unprotected by the almighty IDF. This blow meant an utter humiliation for Zionist terrorism, as the assailants came from none other than the Gaza ghetto. The humiliation was tactical, because the militia scored a military victory in the battle against the Zionist regular troops, who were overwhelmingly better equipped. The humiliation was strategical, because the Palestinians exposed the limits of Israeli counterinsurgency and the deep shortcomings of the colonial power’s security apparatus, which has been unable to suppress the resistance of the oppressed people. And, last but not least, the humiliation was ideological/cultural, because the oppressor’s racist mentality was upended by some “human animals” who could make the chosen people—chosen by Yahweh, the British Empire, and NATO; for the purpose of occupying the lands between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea—bite the dust.

Hamas’s military command, along with other national resistance forces, conducted a true irregular-warfare, combined-arms operation on the 7th of October. The Palestinians’ order of battle had arranged two echelons, with the elite groups opening the gap through which the bulk of the troops—essentially light infantry—would later advance. The breaching and infiltration were covered by an initial artillery attack (thousands of rockets and various types of drones were launched in minutes) and an airborne force comprised of powered paraglider units was deployed. That is not to mention the amphibious attempt along the shoreline near the Strip. Analysts offer different numbers about the total mobilized forces, which would have involved several thousand Palestinians. Leaving aside the oscillations of this estimation, the concentration, sequence, complexity, and achievements of the attack suggest that the guerrilla command of this combined tactical force generated an operational level comparable to that of a regiment.

We insist on the irregular nature of the Palestinian militia because the clandestine planning of the Al-Aqsa Flood from the Gaza ghetto—right under the noses of the Aman, the Mossad, and countless other counterinsurgency organizations—would have been impossible without fulfilling an objective requirement of class struggle against a state actor: hiding among the masses. The overwhelming asymmetry between the contending forces calls for the application of this class struggle principle that mediatizes the continued action of any insurgent movement opposing a state, be it a petty-bourgeois terrorist group, a national guerrilla movement, or the revolutionary proletariat. The coincidence in this point should come as no surprise. The reconstitution of Marxism as a vanguard theory demands that we underscore the nature of the state as an objective social relation and as the political concentrate of the historical experience of all ruling classes succeeding each other throughout history, transferring the spoils of the state from one hand to another. This cumulative experience encompasses revolution and counter-revolution, chaos and order, the means that enable access to power, those that allow stabilizing its dominion and those that precipitate its fall. This universal experience is objective and is specifically coded into every bourgeois state. From this perspective, away from any dualist or structuralist speculation, it is easier to understand the Leninian characterization of the state as special bodies of armed men, as a political-organizational entity which is both a product of class society and a special moment of it. That is, a manifestation of the internal tearing suffered by the capitalist mode of production (social production–private appropriation) and, simultaneously, the form of its (false) resolution. The capitalist state is the collective bourgeois that places itself above the factions within the ruling class and the particular interests of the individual capitalist. This contradiction between the state and society can be defined as a contradiction between the state and the masses, because bourgeois society is the mass society. Thus, the masses–state dialectic in its historical dimension represents an opening whose significance is material, objective, universal... and which turns power vacuums into a real political possibility, making hiding among the masses a practical necessity for any insurgent social force intending to face the military power of a state, be it to expel it from a certain land or to destroy it.

Hamas has masterfully adapted to this general context provided by bourgeois society in its Palestinian form. In 2005, the IDF retreated from the Strip applying the dream of the socialist and Noble Peace Prize laureate Yitzhak Rabin: “I would like Gaza to sink into the sea.” Insofar as this Zionist withdrawal was an application of the reactionary “two-state solution,” Tel-Aviv could count on Fatah’s complicity—this being the very reason why the Islamist resistance displaced the latter in Gaza. Israel’s policy of containment from the edges allowed Hamas to fill the power vacuum as the leader of the anti-Zionist resistance and hide among the dense masses in the Strip. Certainly, the Islamist Palestinian bourgeoisie has made a virtue out of necessity, having deduced the methods to apply its class program from the forms of struggle imposed by the Zionist state. The 7th of October was a demonstration of how those impositions have forced Hamas to subvert the technological fetishism inherent to the bourgeoisie, sublimated in the colonial conditions of the Zionist Reich. The key to the successful subversion (though in a tactical operation) of the Hebrew state apparatus lies in the capability, demonstrated by the vanguard of the national resistance, to sustain the armed struggle against the aforementioned state upon a broad mass basis.

The degree of planning displayed by the Al-Qassam Brigades command in October is likewise enlightening, as it dissipates any daydream about insurrection as the way to social revolution. A political-military movement with decades of battle experience behind it (Hamas), hegemonically established among a social basis of oppressed masses (Gaza Strip), with the organizational solidarity of other insurgent movements (Hezbollah, the Houthis in Yemen) as well as the financial and logistical support of relevant regional state actors (Iran, Qatar) at its disposal, dedicated about a year to planning, devising, and creating the specific means for a tactical operation concentrated… in a single day! All with the sole purpose of forcing the Zionist state to negotiate a prisoner exchange! It takes a huge commitment to spontaneist ignorance (a symptom of opportunist senility) to disregard these lessons from the great class struggle and delegate all the complexities of the proletarian revolutionary process to what happens in the meantime, to the circumscribing circumstances of politics, to the spontaneous development of the mass movement.

Thus far, we have focused on a single aspect of the Palestinian national struggle, as it was condensed into the 7 October action, due to the way it sheds light on the tasks that the proletarian vanguard must address as it builds a revolutionary movement. But this particular form of the struggle cannot determine, define, or allow the understanding of the struggle as a whole—neither the struggle being implemented by the Palestinian resistance against the terrorist state of Israel, nor the one that a proletarian party of a new type would implement. The Al-Aqsa Flood became a true flood of the Palestinian masses over Zionist positions: the masses did not simply exceed their leaders’ expectations—they literally overflowed, unstoppably and undeniably, beyond their vanguard’s goals. Despite the shocking organicity seemingly displayed on the 7th of October, the incorporation of the deep masses to the flood was rather the result of breaching the bureaucratic-military colonial dam holding them back inside the ghetto. This unexpected event led to the complete crushing of the Zionist defenses, healthfully swept the settlers away, and altered the scope of the limited mission that had been autonomously programmed by Hamas’s military command in Gaza, according to declarations made by the political leaders of the movement from Qatar. As we have mentioned, and as reported by every observer, the original form of this operation had the objective of capturing a few Hebrew invaders for the sake of exchanging them for Palestinian prisoners. These were the narrow political prospects of such an impressive work of military planning. A later speech by Nasrallah, chief of Hezbollah, cemented this perspective about the flood as a limited tactical operation, restricted to the confines of negotiation between the Islamist leaders based in the Strip and the State of Israel. The 7th of October was never meant to be a meditated bugle call for a new Intifada or an all-out attack by the anti-Zionist axis of resistance. Of course, this is no impediment for these developments to take place anyway, since the swords are drawn.

Nobody can miss that Hamas’s operation unfolds in the context of the Abraham Accords. The consolidation of such a terrifying alliance would legitimate the regional assemblage of Israel and Saudi Arabia—a strategical complication not only for the Palestinians, but also for Tehran, Damascus, or Doha. In any case, the international and geopolitical dimension is inherent to the Palestinian national movement: it is part of its historical configuration and its class morphology, preceding the political hegemony of Islamism in the area. It should be recalled that, after the Second World War and over the course of the anti-colonial struggles in the Middle East, the Palestinian question was an expedient of the general cause of the Arab world. The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was originally an imported product, created ad hoc by the Arab states. The leading cadres of the Palestinian movement were educated in socialist Arab nationalism—the very same ideas that were later spread throughout Ba’athist Syria and Nasser’s Egypt, the promoters of the Great Arab Republic. While revisionist parties accepted post-war Soviet Realpolitik (recognition of Israel), the nationalist left was awed by the rising anti-imperialist revolutionary movement (Vietnam) and the enormity of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Within this context, the left wing of the Palestinian vanguard split from the great house of Arab nationalism to turn their eyes to the proletariat. However, they never left behind their frontist, national logic and, consecutively, neither did they break the Palestinian dependence on the surrounding Arab states. Naturally, this view was also supported by the result of the first Nakba: hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, and later millions, lived as refugees in Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria. These state structures’ borders, which were as recent as they were fickle, owed their existence to the withdrawal of colonial powers rather than to some Arab national self-determination that seemingly remained underway, mystified under the common cause of the war between the Arab states and the State of Israel despite the debacle of the Six-Day War. At the time, the main base of the Palestinian vanguard, nationalist or leftist, was still located outside of the territories occupied by the Zionists since 1967—in the refugee camps east from the Jordan River and in Lebanon, where Palestinians enjoyed ample (though eventually dwindling) freedom to fight against Zionism.

By itself, this original suprastate morphology of the Palestinian national movement would not represent a limit. If anything, it would be the opposite. However, its ideological starting premises (Arab nationalism) plus the determining factors of the regional political context (the existence of Arab states united by anti-Zionism, as demonstrated in the battlefield) led the vanguard to ignore, for decades, the matter of establishing the main base area of the Palestinian revolution… in Palestine itself. The most compelling example of this political line is the plane hijackings by militants of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (main left-wing split from Arab-Palestinian nationalism), meant to put pressure on global and Arab public opinion: propaganda by action, petty-bourgeois terrorism as a tool to stir the mass movement… outside the national territory. Still, this does not detract from the Palestinian fedayeen’s anti-imperialist struggle in Lebanon, Gaza, the West Bank, or the free Jerusalem during that same period. Nor does it erase the attempts, in Marxist terms, to place the center of gravity of national liberation among the exploited masses of the country—even though said attempts, as previously mentioned, were conceived in frontist terms (along the same lines as the majority of the International Communist Movement, which concluded with its dilution in the spontaneous mass movement), respecting the hegemony of the Palestinian bourgeoisie and its international institutionality (the PLO) and, correspondingly, relying on the allied Arab states (whose ruling bourgeoisies were already fully integrated in the global imperialist system, notwithstanding their Third-Worldist lip service). The result of those attempts exposes the limits found by the insurrectionist-spontaneist paradigm in the many front lines where the revolutionaries fought during the October Cycle.

When the Palestinian masses spontaneously took center stage (First Intifada, 1987), the world around them had taken a 180-degree turn: pan-Arabism, with its nuances, was a thing of the past; the Iranian Islamic Revolution stood as an example of how to free oneself from the Western yoke; and Soviet social-imperialism was drawing its last breath. On the field, the proven incapacity of the anti-imperialist left and of secular nationalism culminated in Fatah’s political bankrupt, having become a Kapo of Zionism since the Madrid-Oslo Accords. In this historical context, Hamas emerges from the Palestinian node of the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist movement that has traditionally represented the interests of the regional bourgeoisie that has been excluded from the domain of state power (e.g. in Egypt, Syria, Jordan, or Lebanon). In the heat of the First Intifada, Hamas stormed in formulating into a program the class interests of the petty bourgeoisie and its middle strata—sectors of the Palestinian bourgeoisie who are excluded from trading with the international community and less willing to abide the fate (banishment and/or extermination) that Zion has assigned them. Hamas has learned some powerful lessons from the history of national struggle, which—along with the genocidal pressure from Zionism and its NATO allies—have forced this bourgeois faction to blend in with the most exploited sectors of the people, to rely on the oppressed masses to implement its program (be it to destroy Israel, as they preached in the past; or to pressure Israel, as they have been practicing for years). Nevertheless, this program is still dependent on external factors, as a result of the precarious and contradictory position where this faction of the Palestinian bourgeoisie stands at both a national and an international level. The role that the Arab house once played for the Palestinian national leaders is now played by the house of Islam. Its assistance for the Palestinian cause, as long as it is led by the bourgeoisie, is indispensable. This is why the cause of Palestinian national emancipation cannot be independent if it is led by any stratum of the bourgeoisie: because this class is dependent on the very same imperialist system of international relations in which its main partners are integrated, never questioning its reproduction. As a case in point, in 2012, Hamas applauded the demonstrations against Assad while the Arab League proposed a military intervention in Syria to enforce peace and open humanitarian corridors, just like France and the US did to tear Libya apart. By supporting this foreign interference, Hamas threw away its anti-imperialist credentials before the eyes of other peoples and discredited itself as a movement capable of applying national self-determination. The fact that there are resistant communists committed to showing their solidarity with Assad and Hamas who fail to remember these details is yet another instance of their narrow-minded empiricism and vast forgetfulness—serious symptoms of opportunist senility.

However, we must emphasize that Hamas and the hegemony of its reactionary worldview among Palestinians (particularly in Gaza) are not an origin, but a corollary of a whole historical era. They are the consequence of the opportunist sins of the labor movement, the burden of the unresolved expedients accumulated by the proletarian vanguard during the First Cycle of the WPR. The Palestinian Islamic resistance is now at the vanguard of the struggle against Zionist imperialism. Its class contradictions are those of a stateless bourgeoisie that is facing a colonial war of extermination and is leading a war of national resistance while experiencing a serious dichotomy: unconditional reliance on the national masses or searching for as many sponsors as possible among the Islamic states. In these circumstances, the historically prevalent tendency among the Palestinian bourgeoisie has been conciliation—the propertied classes resorting to the propertyless masses as a means of repositioning, resisting and winning in some negotiations supported by the international community. But, despite the objective contradictions haunting its leaders, the struggle against the national oppression of the Palestinian people contains a mass, democratic, and anti-imperialist aspect that reveals the current validity of the old Maoist adage, as colonialism experienced first-hand on the 7th of October: imperialism is a paper tiger!

Past and present of colonial oppression

We have indicated that the 7 October action took place in the context of anti-Zionist pressure on the Abraham Accords and that everything underlying Palestinian national oppression is a privileged sample of the political structure of the global capitalist system. Like any other deal between cannibals, the imminent signing of the pact between Israel and Saudi Arabia, as the accumulation of forces of imperialism, is built upon the reinforcement of the national oppression of the peoples. For the Palestinian resistance, given its mediate and immediate dependence on the ruling classes in the Arab and Islamic countries, the normalization of Israel within the Islamic international community (advanced by other lesser minions of Yankee imperialism, such as the United Arab Emirates and Morocco) would be equivalent to becoming a sacrifice on Yahweh’s altar. Sacrifice is no metaphor here, because the Zionist plan for the Palestinian people only accepts two paths, both leading to the same extermination camp: fast genocide or slow genocide. The fast genocide has been underway in Gaza for more than a month and a half, truce included. The slow path would imply tightening the screws, turning the colonial regime up a notch. The fast path only needs the Palestinians in the form of corpses. The slow path requires some Fatah-like Arabs who are willing to serve as sepoys under some sort of “police state without the state,” as Mahmoud Abbas’s collaborationist authority in Cisjordan has been accurately characterized.

Isaac Herzog gloats over the disgusting prospect of this victorious scenario. “We have to think about what will be the mechanism, there are many ideas that are thrown in the air,” said the Israeli president, convinced that “we can’t leave a vacuum,” that Gaza can never again be a “terror base.” As the Zionist troops walk through walls and step into Gazan buildings and tunnels, the General Staff keeps looking to the north. There has been speculation about a big new intervention in Lebanon. Nasrallah stated that his movement did not take part in the action orchestrated by the Al-Qassam Brigades, not that they intended to sit back and watch. The blows between Hezbollah and Israel have intensified over these weeks. Shared geopolitical interests: without Hamas in the southernmost corner of Israel, the axis of resistance would lose strategical depth and the IDF would be free to embark on new enterprises; a weakened Hezbollah in southern Lebanon would deepen the increasing isolation of the Palestinian resistance in Gaza, the West Bank, and whatever may be left of the free Jerusalem. Iran, the regional power that directly opposes the Yankee–Zionist–Saudi triad, would find itself in the same situation. The viability of the full pack of the Abraham policy, as far as Palestine is concerned, is being determined right now by military means. Its advocates and detractors cannot detach themselves from this precipitated fact that pushes the region closer to the abyss of a great war. So long as the pieces fit together, how they do so is incidental for the US. Their priority is ensuring that their regional transmission belts act as such and are able to contribute mediately to their strife against China. Undoubtedly, a great regional war would make the increasingly embarrassing pivot to Asia more complicated, but it is what it is in the best of all possible worlds.

There are many threads that intertwine Palestine with global politics, setting it up as a determining factor of the immediate course of inter-imperialist contradictions, the feud between regional powers, and the national liberation struggle of the oppressed peoples. This is the immediate political negative of the history of class struggle in those lands, marked by fire and blood at the hands of colonialism in its classical form. After the disturbed spiritual father of Zionism, the Hungarian Theodor Herzl, had signed in the late 19th century that a Jewish state in Palestine would be a part of a “rampart of Europe against Asia;” in 1920, a certain Winston Churchill (the spice of every genocide perpetrated by British imperialism in the first half of the 20th century) wrote a panegyric (Zionism versus Bolshevism. A Struggle for the Soul of the Jewish People) where he asked the good Jews for practical displays of patriotism and repudiation of the internationalist, Judeo-Bolshevik terrorism—urging them to pull up stakes and embark on a journey from Europe to the promised land, Palestine, where they would receive support from the Empire as stated in the Balfour Declaration, issued in November 1917. No communist should ever forget this: Israel was originally built as an instrument of the global bourgeoisie to combat proletarian internationalism, to sow the seeds of nationalist discord among the peoples and to hinder the process of the WPR.

Zionism is born and reproduced, culturally and practically, in symbiosis with colonialism. Ethnic cleansing, social-nationalist communal articulation, and militarism are the constituent foundations of the current Israeli regime. In our recent statement in solidarity with Palestine, we said that the Army—the Tzahal—is Israel’s actual national party, the key mediation to understand contemporary Zionism as a movement and as a state. In 1948, Israel detached from its imperial womb and acquired the class structure of an imperialist state in colonial conditions, that is, in an artificial manner. While such a structure is generically defined by the alliance between financial capital and the labor aristocracy, in the early days of Israel the most abstract aspect of this equation (financial capital) was an international scion grafted onto the rootstock previously cultivated by the Ashkenazi socialist pioneers. The Zionist groups that migrated to the Levant founded small sectarian communities with cooperativist production, independent from the oppressed Arab peasant masses which they themselves plundered and expelled from their lands, becoming a military foothold for the British and the French. The social-nationalist and petty-bourgeois kibbutz movement served as a mass platform for the plans of imperialism, providing a growing special body of armed Zionists wielding a communitarian and racist ideology, ready to take in every bit of military and financial aid from the imperial metropolitan states. As a product of colonialism, the historical configuration of the imperialist state of Israel, the formation of its backbone, expresses the political alliance between a number of imperialist powers and the Zionist aristocracy of labor. The Tzahal is, originally, the collusion of Anglo-American militarism with the Histadrut—a mass movement woven by all kinds of bourgeois social relations built upon the associative communitarianism of the Zionist pioneers. The subsequent development of Israeli society (which has received millions of Jewish immigrants in successive waves, in a true replacement and extermination of the local population) is unfathomable if this reactionary complicity is disregarded. The country’s later neoliberal shift (analogous to the one experienced by the imperialist societies of the Western bloc) is the result of class struggle across decades, of the internal contradictions of a regime whose substratum is more than ever the apartheid against non-Jews (20% of the total population). But the current correlation of forces—the decline of the Israeli labor aristocracy to the benefit of other bourgeois factions—has altered neither the basic class structure of the country nor the essence of its international ties.

Israel is a sovereign country possessing nuclear weaponry, whose integration with imperialism and colonialism makes it dependent on the great powers—mainly the US. However, nothing is unilateral. Israel does indeed depend on the imperialist bloc commanded by Washington, but the Zionist state is an irreplaceable piece for this bloc in particular and for imperialism as a whole. In the geopolitics of Western imperialism, Israel’s role as a defense line of American interests is evident. As an artificial graft on the Middle East, the Hebrew state is an advanced manifestation of the subjective and external action of imperialism on the peoples, it is the racist and criminal crystallization of how the bourgeoisie creates a world in its own image and likeness, the crude demonstration of the handling of the masses–state (Histadrut–Tzahal) dialectic by global imperialism. For this reason, Israel is an international condensate of the bourgeoisie’s historical transition from progress to reaction—a transition which far precedes the formation of the Zionist state. The State of Israel showcases how the bourgeoisie has solved a classic, universal problem of the Enlightenment and the democratic revolution: it has solved the Jewish question with colonialism, racism, and fascist corporativism. This is why Israel is also a key cog in the articulation of the dominant imperialist discourse. The form of ideology of victimism known as the “Holocaust industry” is a vile excuse that the Pharisees use to wash their hands of their crimes. But, more than anything, it is a worldview that is fully functional to monopoly capitalism and its tendency towards corporativism (a manifestation, in imperialist terms, of the fundamental contradiction of capitalism, that is, social production–individual appropriation). In gratitude for the colonial state that Western imperialists granted them (by exterminating the Palestinians), the Zionists returned the gift to their progenitors, blazing a trail for using victimism as a political tool. Nowadays, victimism articulates the way of thinking and acting of every ruling faction and trend all around the world. Quite the epitaph for bourgeois society: here lies a victim of itself… although we, as communists, work so that the tombstone of barbarism may read: here lie the enemies of revolution.

Palestine and the reconstitution of proletarian internationalism

An old poster of the resistance reads “Palestine: Core of the World.” This slogan can be dialectically acknowledged from a materialist perspective, on the basis of a communist principle: the constitution of the proletariat as an independent party robs national liberation movements “of their apparent autonomy, their independence of the great social revolution” (Marx) and subjects their fate to that of the proletarian revolution. In this case, the Palestinian shall not be free as long as the worker remains a slave. Putting an end to the Catastrophe is impossible without the Return of communism, because the national oppression of Palestine assumes the concrete form of colonial oppression by an imperialist metropolis planted in its own territory, which suffocates it with all kinds of extra-economic coercive methods (expropriation of lands, houses and all national resources; destruction of industry and agriculture; intervention and control of trade, taxes and finances; a permit system for Palestinian workers in Zionist territory…) as part of a plan of national extermination. Therefore, national self-determination and the destruction of the State of Israel are two directly intertwined aspects of Palestinian liberation.

Ever since its historical formation, the constituent elements of the political morphology of the Palestinian national movement are determined by its class character—bourgeois. The contradictions of those parties and factions who have played the role of vanguard of this movement are the subjective record of the Palestinian bourgeoisie’s place in the world: a propertied, capitalist, yet stateless class, doomed to colonial extermination and surviving by relying on a number of international allies who cannot break the oppressive imperialist chain to which they belong. The practical trajectory of the Palestinian national movement demonstrates that the democratic character of the pending revolution can only be resolved as a revolution of a new type led by the proletariat. The destruction of the bourgeois state requires applying the proletarian solution to the contradiction between the state and the masses: the subsumption of the former into the latter, the violent substitution of the bourgeois state machinery with the people in arms, and its articulation as a base area for a unitary, democratic, and international republic for all of Palestine. This program—as the form assumed by the dictatorship of the proletariat in the conditions of this oppressed country, constrained and repressed by a colonial, political-military structure—can only be carried out through the transformation of the national resistance war into a people’s war, integrating this process as an organic part of an internationalist revolutionary movement which builds a stable mass platform in the rearguard of Zionism for the military struggle against its bourgeois state. Whether the ancestral origin of the proletarians that make up this internationalist movement beyond the green line is Ashkenazi, Druze, Muslim, Ethiopian, Sephardic, Christian, etc. will be of little importance. But neither people’s war nor proletarian internationalism can be directly deduced from the immediate, objective context we have analyzed so far—this is not about coherently stretching the resistance war, or about observing a false political instinct of solidarity between the sections of an international class whose material reproduction takes place in national compartments, as the class struggle in the Levant tragically shows. This is about elevating the proletariat to the position of vanguard fighter for democracy, about the reconstitution of the Communist Party in Palestine as a previous objective requirement for the transformation and revolutionization of society via people’s war.

Then, our duties towards the Palestinian revolution must include the reinforcement of proletarian internationalism, contributing to the revolutionary left in Palestine coming to the fore from the river to the sea. The end of the October Cycle has left a devastating global picture, which the proletariat is unable to influence independently. The intensity of this devastation rises to unspeakable levels in the mortified Palestine, mercilessly torn asunder by a colonial power. There, the anti-imperialist resistance is hegemonized by the nationalist and Islamist component of the bourgeoisie, while the vanguard of the proletariat is dominated by militarist and frontist reformism—an understandable correlation in these circumstances of permanent siege and colonial annihilation, of a war of resistance against national extermination and in the general context of withdrawal of the WPR. Acknowledging this objective situation of the vanguard in no way diminishes the merits of the Palestinian workers and peasants: their dignity in the anti-imperialist struggle is an example for every revolutionary communist. For its part, the working class in Israel is rotten with Zionism, although there is a minority refusing to cooperate with the extermination or participate in the colonial war. That section of the working class does not defend a revolutionary line, but instead waves the white flag of social-pacifism. Still, this (non-proletarian, non-Marxist, non-internationalist) opposition maintains a certain level of decorum in a militarized bourgeois state—whose national party is the Army, where fascist pogroms are promoted by the authorities, where censorship, imprisonment, or murder are the fate of the dissidents who question the racist foundations of the regime and its criminal war… and where the very history of the labor movement has developed, with different nuances, under the influence of Zionism. An immediate decorum, since it hampers the war machinery of its own government, and a mediate decorum, because it signals that—even in the belly of the beast—there is an objective social basis for implementing a unitary policy among the peoples for the common anti-Zionist struggle, built upon the two-line struggle and the erection of an internationalist reference.

Of course, the conditions of both peoples cannot be equated, nor those of their respective vanguards. The Palestinians are the oppressed people, and all forms of their struggle are legitimate and necessary. The working class of Israel is complicit in this oppression. Its hands are stained with the blood of slaves and can only be washed with the blood of the master: only by taking the initiative and fulfilling the requirements of this internationalist mission (the destruction of the Zionist state) will it atone for its social-chauvinist sins and earn the trust of its peers. But we must insist on the general setting which the vanguard of both countries navigate to showcase that, from its particular and immediate material premises, from within the nationalist spiral encouraged by the reactionary classes and by imperialism, only the same bourgeois consciousness that obstructs social and national emancipation may emanate. Amidst the vortex of nationalism, foreign voices and external references may acquire a powerful quality as a guide line for those sections of the international vanguard that are submerged in the most terrible forms of barbarism.

What are those foreign and external voices telling the Palestinian and Israeli vanguard? Forcibly, the traditional stance on the Palestinian question is losing steam among the revisionists in the Spanish state. However, one can still hear some nostalgic voices chanting the two-state solution. The Communist Party of the Workers of Spain (PCTE, for its Spanish acronym) can be satisfied, because President Sánchez, whose first big act in his new term was a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, is already working to “recognize Palestine as a state.” This presidential promise, in the midst of the very same genocidal escalation by his Zionist allies to which his own government contributes, does nothing to bring the Palestinians any closer to freedom, but it lives up to the words once uttered by a minister of the GAL: “We Spaniards are very good at burying.” The PCTE, a practical party indeed, will attend the ceremony with some plastic flowers. Beside it, the Workers’ Front (Frente Obrero in Spanish) adds further nuance: reconstruction of the 1967 borders, rejection of Zionist terrorism and—here comes the nuance—denouncement of Palestinian Islamism, in an attempt to evoke the times when the left piloted the resistance. Social-fascism cannot hide its opportunist senility—the 1967 borders did not only reinforce the State of Israel, nor do they only involve the recognition of Zionist terrorism, but the insistence on this reformist program by the Arab left was precisely one of the main reasons why the Islamists climbed to the leadership position of the Palestinian resistance. Moreover, those Islamists, in their bourgeois pragmatism (Hamas), already accepted in 2008 and ratified in 2017 the same solution that the crusaders of the Workers’ Front embrace along with Sánchez and Mohammed VI: the colonial-imperialist farce of the two states. Amid this revisionist choir, a few other voices hope to distance themselves from the two-state solution. One of them belongs to the Spanish Communist Workers' Party (PCOE) who, after their statement published on the 15th of November, might as well hang the liquidation and closing signs and absolutely nothing would change, according to their own answer to the question of what can the international working class do in the face of the situation in Palestine? Full of vivaciousness, they replied that “only the organization of the working class will put an end to the fascist genocide and the capitalist system.” According to the PCOE, unions “show us the way forward. They did not mean the general secretary of the General Workers’ Union, or UGT (a criminal charge from the proletarian point of view—there is no need to elaborate further), who left his purple foulard at home and rushed to cry for the victims of Hamas at the Embassy of Israel. The PCOE expressly points at the Barcelona dockers, who in early November refused to work with ships that were susceptible of transporting weapons. The dockworkers themselves stressed that this “is not a political statement” and that this measure is strictly based on a “rejection of any form of violence.” The just practical decision of the Barcelona stevedores hinders the logic of imperialist militarism. The PCOE’s voice hinders the PCOE: sometimes, it is better to remain silent and be thought a liquidationist at the rearguard of the labor movement than to speak and remove all doubt. If workers and their apolitical, pacifist unions are the ones who show communists the way forward to support Palestine, then what would the workers, the communists, and the Palestinians need the PCOE for? For absolutely nothing, luckily for each and every one involved. And yet, through a biased question and an economistic answer, the PCOE seems to have caught a small glimpse of the truth, as it has accurately depicted the role that such revisionist detachments play in the world—representatives of a senile class, incapable of understanding elemental aspects of Marxism–Leninism and class struggle, devoid of any political perspective, and whose organic life consists in leeching off workers, communists, and oppressed peoples.

The two-state policy is not a practical solution to the Palestinian question at all—unless one actually supports the slow path to genocide, as the thirty years passed since Madrid-Oslo can certify. The pragmatic voice of phoney communism includes other economistic nuances, but all of them converge in telling the Palestinians that revolution is implausible, that an internationalist policy with the Israeli proletariat is impossible—which is equivalent, intended or not, to rejecting the revolutionary destruction of the Zionist state and keeping the Palestinians dependent on their bourgeoisie, subjected to the imperialist chain. This is the solidarity projection of the labor aristocracy’s place in society: the union as the platform for all workers’ political action, class dependence on the financial capital, and the pursuit of its own quota in the monopolist, bourgeois state.

Phoney communism denies the possibility of building internationalist and democratic coexistence among different peoples. They have accepted that we live in the best of all possible worlds and, acting like the renegades they are, they strive to reproduce every element of it. Regarding the vanguard in Palestine and Israel, the revisionists in the Spanish state contribute to preserving the dissension and mistrust between peoples, as well as promoting reformism and nationalism. The revisionists ride the bandwagon of imperialism and its inveterate policy for Palestine. Let us not forget: the British bourgeoisie—a seasoned practitioner of imperial crime in Ireland, India, etc.—sowed discord among neighbors in the Levant with the declared purpose of combating the internationalist vanguard and thwarting the WPR. The revisionists stand with Churchill and the Empire. We stand with Stalin and the Comintern. The Georgian, in his synthesis of the general line of Marxism on the national question, said that in times of counter-revolution, the more powerfully the wave of nationalism advances, the louder must be the call for proletarian internationalism. The Comintern granted this idea universal status and put it into practice in its articulation as the global movement of the class’s elevation towards communism. The Communist Party of Palestine was constituted in 1923 on the basis of the unity and indivisibility of proletarian class struggle, with the goal of promoting the fusion of Jews and Arabs into a single revolutionary movement. The Comintern, built upon the core of the revolutionary praxis of the Bolshevik Party and the Soviet proletariat, provided the vanguard of Palestine with an internationalist horizon. This is the way forward for communists, the only one that is truly practical and in solidarity with the revolutionary interests of the oppressed classes.

In our October statement, as well as in the present one, we pointed out the elements of the General Line of the WPR regarding Palestine. With this, we have been much more specific and precise than all the pragmatists together, as we place the internationalist solidarity of the proletariat in the field of the real, effective action of the communist vanguard in this general period of impasse and reactivation of the WPR. We are not the ones who build metaphysical castles in the air, nor the ones who shut ourselves away in our rooms inside the ivory tower of reformist activism, nor the ones who refer the peoples crushed by imperialism to the bordello of the UN. We, the revolutionary communists, exercise our working-class solidarity with the Palestinian national movement by internationally projecting, from our specific conditions, the universal dialectic that must preside the Second Cycle of the WPR—the vanguard–Party dialectic. Because this solidarity must be an organic part of the struggle for the ideological and political independence of the proletariat—an objective, material step for the progress and reconstitution of proletarian internationalism. The true communist solidarity, its revolutionary quality, mainly begins with carrying out the struggle against the social-chauvinist and opportunist trends that rot the International Communist Movement and building a vanguard movement that keeps advancing the Summation of the October Cycle. We admit that, in the terrible conditions of the class struggle in Palestine, our foreign and external voice cannot immediately reach or directly impact the revolutionary transformation of the situation. But this is the only horizon, the only realistic alternative, that may provide a guide line for the revolutionaries of those latitudes—inevitably trapped inside the turbine of anti-colonial resistance—in the articulation of an incipient vanguard movement which undertakes the reconstitution of the Communist Party as a requirement to turn the resistance into a people’s war. The only utopia here (a reactionary one) is the belief that the liberation of Palestine may be resolved by the hands of the Arab and Islamic bourgeoisie, and without the collaboration of the masses crushed by Zionism within the borders of the State of Israel: even within the constrained scope of national freedom, it is foolish to forsake internationalism. Is there any other class, party, or fraction that is going to carry out this revolutionary transformation in a practical, direct, and immediate manner? We invite them to take a step forward. Meanwhile—and against the immense wave of nationalism and revisionism—we, as revolutionary communists, shall keep raising the voice of proletarian internationalism with all our strength.

Committee for Reconstitution

25 November 2023