The Palestinian people face their darkest days. We are witnessing a televised genocide. Gaza will eventually turn into a city of tents, there will be no buildings, in the words of an official of the Zionist army. It is clear: what this fascist promises—and his bosses are carrying out—is a second Nakba, an ethnic cleansing on a par with the one executed in 1948 with the establishment of the Zionist state.
Seventy years of history of the State of Israel clearly demonstrate the results of the ethnicist-socialist project of Ashkenazi settlers and the founding father, the social-fascist Ben-Gurion. The Zionist endeavor, despite its initial socialist and collectivist rhetoric, could only fuel supremacism, exclusivism, and reactionary extremism. These are so normalized in Israel that labor or social accessories are no longer needed since the times of Menachem Begin. The current Netanyahu era is the latest chapter of a story which, in the absence of a revolutionary social actor, was carved in stone.
This state debuted with the Nakba, the ethnic cleansing conducted by Ben-Gurion himself. The birth of Israel, its epic story, its war of independence, was not a national liberation war against the oppressor. It was a war of extermination against the Palestinian people—today, like then, branded and treated as “human animals” (“subhumans”, translated from Yoav Gallant’s Zionist language into national-socialist language). Israel was consolidated in a permanent state of war throughout seventy years. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have been, and still are, the principal social unifier, far above any of the parties that make up the Knesset. They are the true national party. The IDF are the main transmitter of the racist and ethnicist worldview, the main mechanism of nationalization and Zionization of Israeli citizens. All life in Israel is mediated by the supremacist war and built as a permanent military camp.
No nation can be free if it oppresses other nations. Civil war cannot erupt in Israel because apartheid and the war of extermination on Palestinians bring all Israeli political families together. This is the first article of its unwritten Constitution. War criminal Netanyahu was just more consistent with the supremacist and colonialist logic of Israel and the IDF than others before him. The new Nakba will not only crush the brave and long-suffering Gazans, but it will also strengthen the most extreme sectors of the Zionist establishment. The Israeli working class will well deserve these chains if it does not break away from the Zionist policy of its ethno-State, if it does not understand that the first step towards its liberation is the destruction of the Israeli bourgeoisie’s state.
The destruction of the Zionist state is antagonistic to the so-called two-state solution. The latter doctrine is based on the nationalist and exclusivist logic that assumes that different peoples cannot coexist in equality and harmony within the same state and, even worse, implies preserving (at most, reforming) the Zionist state, whose existence is the first obstacle before fraternity between the Hebrew and Palestinian peoples.
The two-state solution expresses the Palestinian liberation movement’s opportunism, and implies yielding and submitting to Israel, which has the initiative in this conflict. For this very reason, this line was unable to preserve the tiny concessions won by Palestinian reformism. With the Oslo Accords (1993), Arafat agreed to deactivate the Intifada and act as jailer of his own people in exchange for a Palestinian administration (not sovereignty) and in exchange for a future constituent process of the Arab state. Thus, it was based not on the Palestinian people’s self-determination, but on the permission and promises of the colonial state! Evidently, this laid the groundwork and the conditions to, officially, give the brushoff to the two-state doctrine (a milestone that was finally reached during the Trump administration). Certainly, the heroic Palestinian people and their fighting traditions are a thousand feet above their historical leaders.
With the frustration brought about by Arafat and Fatah’s sterile and failed reformism, a feedback loop was generated between genocidal Zionism and Islamist fundamentalism, because this is the setting that becomes established in the absence of a coherently internationalist social actor —which, today, can only be the communist proletariat. Hamas arose as a legitimate response to Fatah and the PLO’s national treason, intending to continue the Intifada and militarily organizing the Gazan masses. But its bourgeois and Islamist worldview prevented it from taking said struggle any further. Therefore, after the 2014 Gaza massacre, Hamas ended up following the natural path of opportunism in Palestine: it accepted the two-state doctrine and a return to the 1967 borders. In other words, it accepted the so-called international law (dictated by the UN, that assembly dedicated to the distribution of pillage) and fell equally into a frustrating legalistic philistinism.
This is the current operating framework for Hamas, which is more concerned about the favorable international opportunity rather than building the national liberation movement. De facto, with the repositioning of blocs in recent times (expedited by the Russian invasion of Ukraine), Hamas saw an opportunity to abandon the pragmatism of the last few years and launch the definitive strike against the Zionist state. This seems to be the meaning behind the raids and strikes of the last Sukkot—which was a complete humiliation for the IDF. Hamas favored geopolitical calculations (such as Iran and Saudi Arabia’s rapprochement to Israel) over developing the mass movement; favored provocation over militarily organizing the Palestinian masses to fight Israel’s terrorism; and sought to precipitate events for a regional war that the Zionist beast was and is willing to wage. A regional war that is now closer than ever since the Yom Kippur War; a regional war where our class will only act as cannon fodder and where the Palestinian people will be little more than a bargaining chip for the distribution of spheres of influence.
The solution of the Palestinian people’s tragedy has two fundamental pillars: the alliance of the Israeli proletariat and the Palestinian people, and the destruction of the Zionist state. The courageous Palestinian people have, over the past seven decades, given ample proof of their combativeness. There we have the Intifadas, which really had the State of Israel on the ropes and whose lessons must be studied carefully by all communists. The Israeli proletariat, since it belongs to the oppressor nation, must show that it is not the bandwagon of “its” bourgeoisie, it must show the Palestinian masses that it is their first ally in their national liberation struggle, and it must be the first to combat the reformist two-state doctrine. None of this is possible as long as it does not break away from Zionism, as long as it does not direct all its forces towards denouncing “its” state. In this war, the only revolutionary policy that the Israeli proletariat can apply is revolutionary defeatism: to strive, by all means, to defeat and destroy the Zionist state itself in the war of extermination that it is waging. Only this way can it be worthy of the internationalist trust of its class and, most especially, of the Palestinian people. Only this way can the Palestinian and Hebrew peoples live together in trust and equality.
This would be a true demonstration of democracy in national matters and a school of education in internationalism for the masses of the world, providing an exceptional position for communist propaganda. But it does not seem like this will be the result of the current massacre. Decades of liquidation of communism have not only dismantled the proletariat’s capability to act as an independent social subject, as a Communist Party. They have also dismantled the proletarian and classist worldview, leaving communists themselves in the rearguard of one or another faction of the bourgeoisie. We communists must denounce the Zionist state, both for its own imperialist and genocidal nature and for being a strategic partner of the imperialist bloc which “our” state belongs to—a state oppressing Galician, Basque, Catalan, and Spanish proletarians. However, this is not enough. This denunciation, this application of revolutionary defeatism and of the defense of the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination, must serve as a guiding thread for the main task of our time: the recovery of Marxist thinking, of independent class thinking, the ideological reconstitution of communism.
Solidarity with the Palestinian people!
Down with the Zionist state!
For the reconstitution of communism!
Committee for Reconstitution
15 October 2023