Fourteen months after the beginning of the conflict in Gaza, the rapidly unfolding events come to confirm it is a clash between regional and world imperialisms. On the blood and unspeakable suffering of the Palestinian people speculate the bourgeois powers for their purposes of mere capitalist profit.

In Gaza, it is not a Palestinian national struggle but a resistance to survive of a population held hostage in a war between bourgeois states, and militias in their pay, kept imprisoned in the Strip by many jailers, including the bourgeois Israeli, Egyptian states and Hamas militias.

Since early September, IDF operations have extended north into Lebanon against pro-Iranian Shiite Hezbollah militias.

These, in support of Hamas militias, had since Oct. 8, 2023, taken to striking Israel daily with missiles and drones, forcing the evacuation of some 70,000 Israelis from the northern area bordering Lebanon. On July 27, a Hezbollah missile hit Majdal Shams, in the Israeli-occupied Golan since 1967, a Druze-majority town, killing 12 children. Majdal Shams lies on the slopes of Mount Hermon, whose 2,800-meter-plus summit, the highest from the entire Syria to Sinai, is in Syrian territory.

Israeli operations against Hezbollah began with daily air force bombardments targeting areas of the country and the capital Beirut controlled by the Shiite party. These were joined on Sept. 17 and 18 by explosions of pagers and portable radios carried by militiamen and men in the service of the Shiite party, killing dozens and wounding thousands, some seriously, even the Iranian ambassador in Beirut. On Sept. 27, a very violent bombing hit the bunker in the Lebanese capital where Hezbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah was staying, killing him. A substantial part of the Shiite party’s leadership structure was eliminated.

In the meantime, the State of Israel has massed troops on the border and since October 1 has begun a ground operation. This, however, has been limited, with penetrations into Lebanese territory no more than about ten kilometers, aimed at targeting military infrastructure built by Hezbollah after the previous conflict with Israel in 2006.

Operations in southern Lebanon have been far more limited than those carried out in Gaza since the end of October 2023, due to the superior warfare strength of Hezbollah militias compared to Hamas militias, both in terms of equipment and training. This fact manifested itself immediately, with several casualties among Israeli soldiers. However, between air, spy and ground actions, the Israeli operation against Hezbollah has been an undoubted success, weakening it greatly.

Hezbollah’s missile launches against northern Israel since the day after the Oct. 7 massacre by Hamas militias in the kibbutzim in the south, established a link between the two forces and the two conflicts, within the more general framework of Iran’s strategy to strengthen its imperialist interests, which conflict with the rest in the region, using pro-Iranian militias in Syria, Iraq, Lebanon with Hezbollah and in Yemen with the Houthis.

All these fighting forces constituted the so-called "circle of fire" of the bourgeois regime in Tehran, as well as the so-called "Shiite corridor", which ran from Iran to the Mediterranean coast of Lebanon via northeastern Iraq and Syria.

Israel’s operation against Hezbollah led to a fragile truce as of Nov. 27. Regardless of its duration, the first result of this agreement was to break the link between Hezbollah’s action and that of Hamas, which thus finds itself more isolated in Gaza.

Above the outcomes of the conflicts between the capitalist powers and their militias, what is important to note is that the proletariat if it took part in these conflicts would not gain any useful results for itself. There is nothing revolutionary or even progressive about the terrain of inter-imperialist confrontation. The nationalist, i.e., bourgeois, Palestinian and Kurdish parties that are part of these war fronts do not represent any positive historical gains.

The weakening of Hezbollah in Lebanon was quickly reflected in Syria, with similar subsidence of the pro-Iranian forces that had helped save the Assad regime during the years of the civil war from 2011 until its temporary halt in 2018. This benefited Turkey, which supported the lightning-fast military action that led to the fall of the Syrian regime within a dozen days.

With the fall of the Assad regime, Israel occupied the demilitarized area of the Golan, the summit of Mount Hermon and its Syrian side, and thereby widened the encirclement of Hezbollah forces in southern Lebanon, a strategic disadvantage that added to the disruption of land supply routes from Iran through Syria.

Turkish President Erdoğan, who in the Islamic and Middle Eastern world has always paid lip service to the "Palestinian cause" by pursuing Turkish imperialist aims, has struck at Iranian ones, helping to isolate Hamas in Gaza and strengthen the State of Israel.

When Israel began operations against Hezbollah in September, opportunist parties in Western countries took to flying the Lebanese flag along with the Palestinian flag. But it is first the Lebanese bourgeois parties opposed to Hezbollah that are benefiting and felicitating the Israeli offensive. The idea of a Lebanese population united against Israel is one of the fantasies that excite the feeble minds of opportunists who have replaced class struggle with war between bourgeois states. The only movement in Lebanon that went in the direction of overcoming religious and ethnic divisions was the one that arose in 2019 out of the economic crisis, which set in motion squares that finally united the working class in the struggle for its vital needs, certainly not to support one of the fronts of the many wars tearing the Middle East apart.

Even the bourgeois Iranian regime shows that it supports the Palestinian cause only for the purposes of its imperialist diplomacy: the actions of Hezbollah, the militias in Syria and Iraq, and the Houtis, directed against Israel after October 7, 2023, have remained disconnected from each other, and always at low intensity.

Even the Moscow regime, an advocate of a "new multipolar world", has held fast to a tacit agreement whereby it has never stood in the way of Israeli air force actions that in 14 months of conflict have repeatedly struck pro-Iranian forces in Syria, contributing to the result of the fall of the Assad regime, the weakening of Hezbollah, and the further isolation of Hamas.

In Gaza

Since mid-October, the Israeli army has begun a new operation in the northern area of the Strip, focusing on the towns of Jabalya, Beit Lahia and Beit Hanun, north of Gaza City.

The population, which had been pushed en masse to the south of the Strip, had then partly returned to the north, in the order of several hundred thousand people. This new operation has largely pushed them back out again.

Living conditions have deteriorated further, health-wise and food-wise, with winter and malnutrition advancing. On November 28, three women were killed when crushed by crowds massed to receive bread. Supply convoys, dozens of trucks, are struggling to arrive either because they are being looted by gangs or because the Israeli army is stopping their entry.

The former Chief of Staff of the Israeli army himself, Moshe Yaalon, has declared that "ethnic cleansing" is underway in Gaza, through the destruction of homes, hospitals, schools, the shutting down of food, electricity and water supplies, and bombings.

The Hamas military force appears to have been largely destroyed for several months. However it remains, difficult to say to what extent, its control over the population, with police forces and other salaried personnel. The Israeli government’s proclaimed goal of the "total destruction" of Hamas appears dosed just right to allow its control over the population and an indefinite continuation of military operations in the Strip.

Because the underlying problem, not only of the Israeli bourgeoisie but of all states in the area, is social control.

In 2000 there were 1.5 million inhabitants of the Strip. By the start of the conflict in 2023 they had increased to 2.3 million. An article in Haaretz on Dec. 5, showed how Israeli State Archives records show that "the current aspiration of the far right to =encourage the emigration! of Palestinians from the Gaza Strip merely echoes ideas and proposals discussed in the past by prime ministers, ministers and leaders of leftist governments who were among the country’s founding fathers". Such proposals were made at the time of the occupation of the Gaza Strip with the "six-day war" in 1967, when 400,000 Palestinian Arabs lived there.

The continuity for more than half a century of the goals of Israel’s bourgeois left and right parties and among their governments does not demonstrate-as the supporters of the "Palestinian resistance" argue-the peculiar character of the Israeli state due to its Zionist ideological matrix, but the marked course of every bourgeois state under given material conditions. Oppression of minorities, ethnic cleansing, genocide are not traits peculiar to certain cultures or ideologies but the determined outcome of capitalism and its social control over its national state machinery: in order to stand upright they must necessarily resort to these methods.

In controlling the Gaza proletariat, Hamas and the Israeli bourgeois state act in objective concord. Insoluble task, however, as much for the Israeli state as for all the bourgeois states in the area, so much so that no one wants its inhabitants. It is the entire concert of regional and world powers, it is capitalism as a whole, that keeps more than two million Gazawis imprisoned, stricken by bombs, hunger, cold and disease.

Fourteen months into the conflict, the Hamas Ministry of Health claims nearly 45,000 victims, half of whom died in the first three months of the conflict. Hamas is interested in not distinguishing between militiamen and civilians and inflating the numbers to feed the propaganda theme of "martyred people", but the massacre is admitted by the Israeli government itself, which in fact provides similar numbers.

The conflict that arose there and extended far beyond the Strip, however, is one of the pieces that make up the picture of capitalism’s march toward a new world conflict.

In this perspective, the proletarians and dispossessed of Gaza are today reserved for the first and worst suffering. The way out, for them and for proletarians in all countries, is to struggle and free themselves from the bourgeois parties and regimes that have led them to the present slaughter, and would like them to participate and take sides in this war between imperialisms.

This in Gaza means fighting against Hamas and the other Palestinian nationalist parties. They go in the opposite direction to the search for international solidarity of the working class, the actions against the Israeli civilian population, which alienates the support of those workers who are fighting against the imperialist policy of their bourgeois regime in the name of proletarian internationalism and anti-capitalist struggle.

This is the political direction-the only one that can be called communist-that will be established internationally and also among the Palestinian proletarian masses.

In Israel

On the Israeli side, the casualties of this war are about 1,650, including 1,200 in the Oct. 7 attack and about 450 among the soldiers, at least according to official figures, after the start in late October 2023 of the ground invasion of the Gaza Strip and then a year later of southern Lebanon: one soldier a day. To these must be added about 100 of the 200 abducted on Oct. 7 still in Hamas hands.

These numbers are not certain. For example, former Israeli Army Major General Yitzhak Brik, interviewed Sept. 3 in Haaretz, said the war in Gaza was "driving the army to collapse... before long we will no longer be able to carry out those repeated raids, because with each passing day the Israel Defense Forces are weakening and the number of dead and wounded in action among our soldiers is increasing".

On Sept. 17, still in Haaretz, he reiterated, "Hamas still controls the entire Strip, including the tunnel city and all Gaza residents, in every sector of life. The IDF has no way to end its rule, even though the organization is weaker than in the past. The constant fighting has lost all purpose, and the war of attrition is destroying everything good in Israel: its economy, its international relations, its social resilience and the motivation of its fighters. Many reservists refuse to be recalled again and again".

A leader of the group "Parents of Soldiers Who Shot Enough" said on Sept. 22, "We are patriotic Zionist families. Our children are sacrificing their lives, bodies and souls in a war that has no end... We started in an attempt to prevent the invasion of Rafah in May and we continue to shout today... My son is in the town of Rafah in the south of the Gaza Strip... his mandatory military service was extended by four months after he spent 10 months straight fighting in the Gaza Strip. Not even during the Vietnam War were soldiers left on the battlefield for so long without a break".

Still on December 9, 3 Israeli soldiers were killed in Jabalia. Hamas is therefore still able to carry out sorties. It is necessary for Israel-as it would be for any bourgeois state-to hand over social and political control of the Gaza masses to local bourgeois parties. Short of resorting to a genocidal policy of ethnic cleansing.

Hamas is a party that has a petty-bourgeois heart-with a layer of political cadres drawn from well-presented strata of Palestinian society, particularly students at Islamic universities; it has a body made up of the dispossessed and the underclass-enlisted as laborers through the system of welfare from Islamic charity, following a model similar to that of Hezbollah in Lebanon and drawing historical origins from the Muslim Brotherhood, as well as profitable UN aid management; and it has a bourgeois head, in the highest echelons of the organization, commanded with the strings of international funding by the regional and world bourgeois powers, of which the known ones are Iran, Qatar and Turkey. Moreover, one cannot overlook the fact that it was the Israeli intelligence services themselves who foraged the Islamist Hamas movement to reduce the influence of the secular PLO. This is the reality of the nature and survival of Hamas.

The difficulties experienced by the Israeli army in ground operations in Gaza are reflected in its control of the working class inside Israel. The September 1, 2024 rallies brought hundreds of thousands of protesters to the streets of Tel Aviv and other cities. They have been demanding a truce with Hamas and the release of hostages for months. Moving them is the growing malaise over the endless continuation of the war, the hostages, the trickle of dead soldiers and the economic hardship generated by the conflict, the effects of which companies naturally pass on to wage earners.

As much as the working class is still firmly shackled to the policies of its bourgeois state as expressed by successive governments, these demonstrations stood against the war, thereby against the imperialist policy of the Israeli bourgeois state and its submission to the American master.

The Histadrut regime union, the largest labor confederation in the country, has called for a general strike on September 3 in support of a negotiated settlement to bring the hostages home. The Histadrut has a deep-rooted tradition of class collaborationism. For years it has run cooperatives, companies, banks, schools with a turnover of 20 percent of the national GDP. As the overproduction crisis of capitalism progressed, which the international bourgeoisie temporarily remedied with so-called neo-liberal economic policies, "Zionist socialism" also fell into decline. The Histadrut has lost its economic empire and membership has plummeted from 1,800,0000 to 200,000, only to rise again in recent years to 800,000, out of a labor force of 4.5 million wage earners in 2023.

The Sept. 3 general strike was supported by the country’s industrialists. The president of the Employers’ Association, said, "The Association supports the strike and accuses the government of failing in its =moral duty! to bring the prisoners home safely. Without the return of the hostages, we will not be able to end the war or rehabilitate ourselves as a society and begin to rehabilitate the Israeli economy".

In the intentions of the pro-padronal leadership of the Histadrut, the strike was certainly not intended to crack national solidarity between the working class and the bourgeoisie, but rather to support a political deployment of the ruling class and to give vent to the workers’ unease over their worsening conditions by preventing actions beyond its control.

But for the workers, the motive for the strike is their living conditions, and going on strike in a country at war is a lesson that can serve the proletariat of Israel in the future when the Israeli bourgeoisie, having regained unity about the line to conduct its class politics, wants to involve the workers more and more in its warmongering and imperialist policy.

Moreover, the strike brought Arab-Israeli workers closer to Jewish workers, cracking the wall erected by the Israeli, Iranian and Arab bourgeoisies to divide them.

After the September 3 strike, the demonstrations returned to their previous size, with several thousand participants. Obviously, military "successes" carry with them the poisoned fruit of pacifying the home front. But difficulties have become apparent even for the most prosperous of the imperialist countries in the area.

The working class cannot get out of the imperialist war, or prevent its ripening and growth, by taking sides on one of its fronts, but by working in each country on the workers’ struggle against the militarism and imperialism of its own bourgeois regime--whether democratic or authoritarian--and on this basis to weave a bond of union, solidarity and brotherhood above national, religious and ethnic divisions among workers all over the world.

The key to historical progress is no longer, as indicated by opportunist parties, in national accommodation struggles that set themselves the goal of a "just accommodation" among states within the framework of capitalism. In the Middle East it is not in the struggle of the Palestinians for their own nation-state-exploited for decades by all the powers in the area for their own ends-but in the proletarian uprising that brings down the regimes of all the countries in the area, in Iran, Egypt, Turkey and in Israel. The Palestinian question is used in the various countries, in Iran as in Turkey, to divert proletarians from the struggle for their immediate and political interests and to bind them to their national bourgeois regime.

Only after the proletarian revolution will the national questions left unresolved in the course of the historical development of capitalism, from its ascendant phase to the current putrescent one of imperialism, find a solution.