The report to the meeting denounced how already at the end of January the truce was proving fragile. The Israeli state, a long arm of the US war machine, fought on seven fronts: in Gaza, in Lebanon against Hezbollah, in Syria and Iraq against pro-Iranian militias, against the Houthis in Yemen, against Iran, and finally against the armed groups of Hamas and the IPJ in the West Bank.

In this broad framework, the war fought in these 15 months by Israel has been a success. Hezbollah, militarily much more powerful than Hamas, has been greatly weakened, with a considerable part of its leadership physically eliminated, with its logistical structures in southern Lebanon largely destroyed and with equally heavy blows inflicted along the Beqa’ Valley and in the Shiite neighborhoods of Beirut. This forced Hezbollah into a truce on November 27, with Israel’s right to strike Hezbollah if they do not retreat north of the Litani River, a right which Israel has exercised with near-daily targeted bombings.

Not even a week later, the advance of the Sunni militias organized by Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) began in Syria, conquering Aleppo on December 2 and taking Damascus on December 8, deposing the Assads in power since 1971. This led to the breaking of the so-called "Shiite corridor", which from Iran passed through Iraq and Syria to Lebanon, supplying Hezbollah with weapons, and to the flight from Syria of the pro-Iranian militias, who retreated to Iraq. This was a second heavy blow to the Iranian regime and its ambitions in the region.

The only things left to distract Israeli forces from the conflict in Gaza are the pro-Iranian militias in Iraq and the Houthis in Yemen. Indeed, after the fall of Assad in Syria on December 8, Israel launched a wave of bombings against the military facilities of the Syrian Arab Army (SAA), the regular Syrian army, almost completely destroying all of its air, anti-aircraft and naval forces.

The fall of Assad has favored Turkish imperialism, which with the Syrian National Army – financed, supplied and trained by Ankara – acts in the Northwest of Syria fighting the Kurdish forces of the Democratic Union Party (PYD), the Syrian branch of the PKK, who lead the Syrian Democratic Forces, a Sunni Arab minority. The Kurds control the area east of the Euphrates, the richest in oil and agricultural products, and limited parts in the North. The Syrian Kurds had a non-hostile relationship with the Assad regime, which granted them substantial autonomy.

The strengthening of Turkish imperialism in Syria has led the PYD leadership to seek an alliance with the Israeli regime. It is worth noting how little questions of principle are worth to bourgeois regimes and parties, which they use to justify their wars. The Israeli regime denounces Kurdish national oppression while perpetuating Palestinian oppression in a sea of blood. At the same time, Kurdish nationalist parties ally themselves with the two imperialisms – the US and Israel – primarily responsible for a national oppression identical to that which they have suffered. On the other hand, there is no solidarity between oppressed national minorities, even if they are so geographically close. From the moment that national struggles no longer have any progressive historical function, nationalist parties become only puppets of the imperial powers.

The bourgeois ideological justifications are worthless. The United States considers the PKK a terrorist organization, but not the PYD, the Syrian branch of the same party, supported by the USA. The HTS was also defined by the United States and the European Union as a terrorist organization but, through Ukrainian military aid, they were supported by the United States, finally recognized in power by all Western countries. Russian imperialism had to evacuate from Syria a large part of its armed forces – land, air and naval – and probably also the naval bases of Tartus and Chmejmim air base. For Moscow, the loss of these bases in Syria would represent a hard blow, losing for it a logistical-operational hub in the Eastern Mediterranean, which was needed for the Russian imperialist projection towards Africa.

The reaction to the setbacks suffered by Iran and Russia was the signing on January 17 of a “comprehensive strategic partnership treaty” between the two countries. However, Israel enjoyed almost unlimited access to Syrian airspace coordinated with the Russian command.

In Gaza, however, the outcome cannot be said to be equally in favor of Israel. Although about 20,000 militants from Hamas and other Palestinian nationalist parties have died in the 15 months of fighting and their military strength has been greatly reduced, the Israeli government’s proclaimed goal of destroying Hamas and preventing it from maintaining power in the Gaza Strip has not been achieved.

Hamas said in the days following the truce that the deployment of its militiamen and police was intended to “prevent a power vacuum and chaos, to ensure public order despite the devastation” and that it “managed to restore all police stations in the Strip to normal operation.” On Thursday, January 23, the Hamas Interior Ministry announced that its men were facing attacks on food trucks by “criminal gangs.” It is likely that they are criminal groups, but also the starving population. This puts at risk the gains of Hamas and its control over the population.

Now that the Israeli bombs are temporarily no longer raining down, it will not be easy for Hamas to maintain control over 2.3 million people, in the conditions to which the war has reduced them. We must believe the reports that Hamas continues to recruit many young people and very young people, full of hatred and anger for the massacres and destruction carried out by Israel. But there is no doubt that among the population there is also discontent towards Hamas that dragged the Gazans into a ruinous war. Furthermore, being a militiaman provides a source of income in a destroyed economy.

Hamas’ show of force is therefore not only directed against Israel but also against the proletariat and the dispossessed of Gaza, to warn them that any uprising will be responded to with lead from those well-dressed and armed policemen and militiamen. Even for the Israeli bourgeois state, on the one hand, having signed a truce with Hamas means admitting that it has not achieved the proclaimed objective of the war, on the other hand it allows it to maintain a state of emergency within the country, of impending war, necessary to control the Israeli working class.

The sold-out Israeli bourgeoisie propagates the lie that all Palestinians are with Hamas, just as, on the other side, the Palestinian bourgeois parties inculcate the idea that all Israeli workers consent to the extermination of the Palestinians and that therefore there can be no proletarian solidarity above the front. Therefore, the objective of destroying Hamas, in addition to being very difficult to achieve, is not even desirable for the Israeli bourgeoisie.

The roots of Hamas are the funding of the regional powers that support it and the dispossessed and Palestinian sub-proletarians who enlist in its militias. To destroy Hamas, bombings from the sky are not enough and more men on the ground would be needed. This is not sustainable for an army armed to the teeth, thanks to donations from US imperialism, but which already shows signs of crisis, being able to count on a population of only 8 million Israeli Jewish citizens, with a daily drip of victims.

Even if militarily annihilated, Hamas’ lifeblood would spawn a similar party.

Then there is the demographic question. A “Greater Israel” that includes the West Bank and Gaza would have a population that is 50% Arab-Palestinian. Capitalism in its youthful and progressive phase would aspire to overcome ethnic and religious divisions in the nation, with economic growth and with radical positive structural reforms. Capitalism in its senile, imperialist phase, closes itself in racism, in the oppression of minorities. In Israel, in the “Jewish State”. For the "Palestinian question" therefore the bourgeois Israeli state has no solution. On the other hand, the proclamations for the "destruction of Israel" by Hamas serve to keep Israeli workers terrified and to seek protection in their state, which will lead them to massacre.

This is why Israel has supported Hamas financially for years and more recently accepted that Qatar would increase its funding. This is why today it rejects any plan to entrust political control to the Palestinian National Authority, which holds it in the West Bank: because saying “no” to the PA in Gaza is equivalent to saying “yes” to Hamas. The “solution” that capitalism has to offer to the Israeli and Palestinian proletariat is a general conflict, a third world war. In it, it will be possible, through ethnic cleansing and genocide, to capitalistically “resolve” this age-old conflict, either with “Greater Israel” or with “free Palestine from the Jordan to the sea”, according to the imperialist front that would emerge victorious.

In any case, it would be the proletariat that would be defeated once again, on both sides of the front, united even in defeat because its condition is unique. In Iran, strikes multiplied at the end of the year and in the first months of January. The national currency continues to devalue and inflation continues to grow. If the regime of the ayatollahs were to fall under the blows of the working class fighting the Israeli bourgeois regime, the “external enemy” that supports its internal front would disappear. Both among the Palestinians and the Israelis, the nationalist and warmongering parties would weaken.

It is true that both sides of this war can be considered winners, because the real loser is the proletariat, of Gaza, of Israel and of the entire Middle East. A truce desired and decided by the bourgeois forces that wanted the war, not determined by the rebellion of the proletarian masses on one or both sides of the front, is only a pause while waiting for the resumption of the conflict. But it is also true that all bourgeoisies and their states are intrinsically weak, threatened by the economic and social crisis of capitalism that advances and deepens every day, and that they cannot avoid. They are all historically already defeated because to save themselves they have nothing to offer but death and destruction, the devastation of Gaza and the rest of the world. The proletariat, defeated in every conflict that begins and is consumed to the end, is the problem that capitalism cannot solve and that, when, due to material determinations, it will inevitably reconnect with its party overcoming 100 years of counter-revolution, will be the death for all the war machines of capital.