Against War Between Bourgeois States!

The war in Gaza, like the one in Ukraine, is being waged on both sides in the interests of the local bourgeoisies and the regional and global capitalist powers that back them. The working masses are cannon fodder, driven to fight with massacres of the civilian population.

The conflicts in Ukraine, Nagorno-Karabakh and Gaza are connected, manifestations of the march towards a new world war on behalf of capital, pushed toward it by the global economic crisis of overproduction which threatens the profits of all bourgeoisies.

National liberation struggles—in a world that has reached the stage of the historical development of capitalism everywhere, and for decades—no longer have any progressive social content and can only be instruments of war between competing imperialisms. Even the Palestinian liberation struggle no longer has any possibility of resolution in the current context of growing inter-imperialist conflict, but is used demagogically to enslave the Middle Eastern proletariat and place it in one of the war fronts.

In all Arab and Middle Eastern countries the revolt of the proletarian masses has for decades been diverted by the national bourgeoisies against the duo of Israeli-American imperialism. The bourgeoisie needs the external enemy to prevent the working class from understanding that the enemies are at home: that the real enemy is the bourgeoisie, its parties, its regime.

The third world war can only be stopped by a revolution of the working class united across national borders. For the bourgeoisie, leading the proletarians to fratricidal massacre is a question of life or death in the face of the mounting economic crisis of capitalism: if the war doesn’t start, the revolution won’t stop.

The opportunist workers’ parties—remnants of Stalin’s false communism, of its anti-Americanism functional to the interests of Russian or Chinese imperialism—continue today to support the struggle for the illusion of a bourgeois Palestinian state. For decades these parties have meant nothing to the proletarians but are still useful to the bourgeoisie for continuing to discredit communism before the working class, after the infamy of false communism in the USSR and China!

The capitalist oppression of the Israeli wage-earning class and the doubly capitalist and national oppression of the Palestinian proletariat will end only with the proletarian revolution against the Israeli and Palestinian bourgeoisies, with the revolutionary dictatorship of the working class.

For this reason, it is necessary to strengthen the International Communist Party, its conquest in the main countries of the leadership of the movement of workers’ struggles against capitalist exploitation and in defense of their living and working conditions.

 

Hamas and Israeli Government United in the Slaughter of Proletarians

 

As happens when a war develops between bourgeois forces and States, the proletariat is the element that disappears from any description of events. The workers never have a voice in that long-winded work with which the bourgeois States, whether internationally recognized or “de facto”, and the armed bands of capital set about their war preparations, material and ideological. They are only a labor force employed in the production of arms and ammunition to suppress other humans and in the logistical preparation of war. Workers will always have to bear the economic cost of rearmament and the damage of war. The workers in Gaza, who for decades have been made to dig a grid of military tunnels for hundreds of kilometers, know this well. The proletarians in Israel, who have always sacrificed to support the state’s enormous military expenditure, and who are forced to live in perpetual threat and often give their lives for the regional imperialist ambitions of their bourgeois state, the weaponized arm of the United States in the region, know this.

Militarism accompanies every stage of the expanded accumulation of capital in all its historical phases. It is, as Rosa Luxemburg explains in “The Accumulation of Capital”, “a means of first order for the realization of surplus value, that is, as a field of accumulation”. It is always difficult to determine which branch of production is aimed at war purposes and which is not. Revolutionary Marxism has called “economic militarism” that phase in which the demand of the “free” market for individual consumer goods is superimposed by “the demand of the state, centralized in a great unified and compact power”.

This recipe, pioneered for more than a century by the most advanced capitalist states, is now generalized to even the most fragile bourgeois ruling entities, because it is the easiest way for the workers to bear the economic burden of rearmament. The obscurantist, religiously-oriented Hamas party, which imposes itself on the proletariat in Gaza on behalf of other imperialisms, fulfills the function of the State, organized violence of the ruling class on the dominated class. Hamas manages in the Strip the financial resources that come in the form of aid from international bodies, some Arab or Islamic-majority countries and international financiers, often linked to political Islam. It allocates much of it to the military sector.

In the more than sixteen years since the “Battle of Gaza” in June 2007, by which it seized power by force of arms in a bloody clash with the rival Fatah party, Hamas has implemented a repressive anti-proletarian policy. Numerous caravan revolts have been crushed with an iron fist by Hamas, which has acted against Gazan workers as a gendarme on behalf of the Palestinian and international bourgeoisies.

To eradicate in the workers any memory of belonging to the world labor movement, Hamas has, since 2015, banned the celebration of May Day.

Most of Gaza’s population is very young in age, imprisoned by the blockade imposed by Israel and Egypt. Deprived of the solidarity of the workers’ struggles of other countries, Hamas cultivates in those young proletarians an indistinct hatred for Jews in order to keep them away from the class labor struggle. Hamas’ bourgeois political domination induces them to enlist in its militias and other Islamic fundamentalist formations.

Contributing to the recruitment of new militiamen are, in addition to the total isolation imposed by Israel, the periodic massacres committed by the Israeli Air Force and border guards, and the misery caused by the blockade, which induces many young men to resign themselves to one of few available occupations: the arms trade. The elite corps of the Hamas armed forces offer salaries between $400 and $500 to their militiamen, an amount not too paltry by local standards.

Moreover, Hamas, in line in this with the Muslim Brotherhood mainstream to which it belongs, has been able to buy social peace by guaranteeing a fair amount of welfare, subsidies to widows, orphans, and relatives of “martyrs”, and by supporting education and medical care for the indigent; elements that play an important role in maintaining consensus in a territory where almost half of the workforce is unemployed.

Hamas has revealed a greater ability to weld the internal social front than the rival Palestinian Fatah party, which is dependent in everything—politically, economically and militarily—on Western powers.

The management of labor power is the essential problem of any bourgeois regime. In this Israel and its archenemy Hamas wage a parallel war against the proletariat.

For some years now, the Jerusalem government has been favoring the entry of Asian workers from different countries to limit the economy’s dependence on the Palestinian labor force. This is one of a thousand ways through which the Israeli bourgeoisie seeks to secure a disciplined and cheap labor force, while at the same time harassing and blackmailing Palestinian workers. Asian immigration has been numerous in the agricultural sector. Until October 7, more than 30,000 Thai proletarians were living in Israel, about 5,000 of whom were employed on farms in areas bordering the Gaza Strip. In the rampage of the assault, Hamas militiamen not only did not spare Israeli workers, but also slaughtered Asian immigrants. Also falling under the blows of this reactionary party were 30 Thai, 10 Nepalese and 4 Filipino laborers. That these were not random victims is proved by the fact that dozens of these Thai workers were taken hostage by Hamas.

Several thousand Thai workers have been repatriated from Israel by an airlift organized by the Bangkok government, which has offered $1,300 compensation to all who want to return from Israel.

Hamas, like any bourgeois force at war, has no qualms about inflicting mourning and suffering on workers. In this it has allied itself with the equally reactionary and bourgeois Israeli government, which in the months leading up to October 7 opened and closed the Erez crossing, which allows the flow of as many as 20,000 laborers from Gaza, on and off.

Skirmishes with Hamas, characterized by rockets fired from Gaza into Israeli territory and punitive raids by the Israeli Air Force, or demonstrations against the blockade quelled with lead by Tsahal soldiers, held Gazawi border workers hostage by closing them at intervals inside their imprisoned territory.

In the days leading up to October 7, there were 18,500 Palestinian Gazawi workers in Israel. As is always the case when war breaks out between capitalist powers, those from the country being bombed are subjected to tight police control and deprived of freedom of movement. The first measures taken by the Netanyahu government were the cancellation of all work permits and an order by Defense Minister Yoav Gallant allowing the detention of Gazan workers for ten weeks in army bases. Hundreds of these construction workers and farm laborers, considered “illegal combatants”, were forcibly escorted back to Gaza under bombs. Buses dropped them off at the dedicated freight crossing of Kerem Shalom (a toponym with the mocking meaning of “vineyard of peace”) from where they had to travel six kilometers to reach the Strip. Another 4,000 of these workers who were sent to the West Bank, where many of them found refuge in the already crowded Dheisheh refugee camp near Bethlehem, beyond the wall dividing Israel from the occupied territories. All of them live in very difficult conditions, aggravated by anxiety about the fate of relatives left under the bombs that are destroying Gaza.

In this small patch of land meanwhile, the young levers of the proletariat redundant to capital are being led to the slaughter.

Once again, with the October 7 incursion carried out by Hamas, but seized as a propitious opportunity by the Israeli bourgeoisie, war has been imposed on the reluctant proletariat. Capital, of both Israel and the world, has and will have no compunction about carrying out the most heinous acts of violence. A destructive fury of dying capital that will make the memories of the Holocaust and the Nakba pale in comparison.