Nationalist ideologies, converging throughout the world, are vigorously propagated, aimed at inducing peoples to prepare for mutual carnage.

In their manifestation in Israel, these nationalist delusions openly draw on racism, Jewish supremacism, and messianism with biblical references.

The thesis of collective responsibility of the Palestinian population is put forward, which would justify an equally collective punishment. Israeli President Herzog, in the Huffpost newspaper on October 13, 2023, stated that “The entire Palestinian nation is responsible. The rhetoric that civilians are unaware and uninvolved is absolutely untrue: they could have risen up”. Likud MP Tally Gotliv proposed dropping an atomic bomb on Gaza: perhaps she was confident that the atomic bomb would behave like the biblical angel of death on Passover, sparing the Jews and striking only their enemies. An Israeli rabbi declared that Palestinian children are future terrorists, so there is no need to have scruples if they are killed. Words that bring to mind Zyklon B...

The statement made in Haaretz on September 6, 2023, by Tamir Pardo, former head of Mossad, has a different meaning: “A territory where two people are judged according to two legal systems is a state of apartheid”.

The supposed “subhuman” condition of Palestinians in relation to the superior Jewish race is constructed, imposed, and maintained by the State of Israel, which, for example, has had no qualms about supporting, financing, and arming Hamas for about 40 years, with the aim of keeping the Palestinian proletariat subjugated to imperialism and preventing any possibility, however unlikely under the current conditions, of their national affirmation.

It is certainly useful for the Israeli bourgeoisie, and for the North American imperialism of which it is a vassal, to keep the Palestinian proletariat divided between Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank, and even more so from the Israeli Jewish proletariat.

Among the Palestinians, things are no different. In the 1980s, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and Fatah proclaimed that Jews were “sons or brothers of monkeys and pigs”. Thirty years later, the advisor on religious affairs to the president of the Palestinian National Authority called them “humanoids”.

We communists have never underestimated the importance of religions and ideologies, but we know that at their core, what ultimately determines historical events are the relations of production, the class relations. All the aberrations mentioned are only a means used by the Israeli bourgeoisie to pursue its goals, namely the strengthening of its state, which is also useful to the imperialism of which it is a vassal and whose interests it safeguards in the Middle East.

Even among Muslims, the centuries-old rivalry between Sunnis and Shiites is still important, but this does not detract from the fact that in practice it is used according to the interests of the various bourgeoisies.

Capitalists rekindle or dampen ideological and religious disputes to hide their true interests and their true enemies. The umpteenth example is Syria, where a Syrian offshoot of Al Qaeda, which has changed its name several times over the years, has come to power. Hatred of the American “Satan” and the Israeli “Satan” has not prevented this group from receiving weapons and funding from them, either directly or through Turkey, Qatar, and others. Bourgeois alliances come and go, as do terrorism labels.

The Syrian Assad regime, as bloody as all bourgeois regimes and states, was an ally of Russian imperialism: for this reason, the United States, together with its European and Middle Eastern servants, did everything possible to bring it down, ultimately succeeding. To this end, they also made use of their former enemies, Al Qaeda, now returned as good allies and on the path to tolerance, if not yet democracy. Alawites, Christians, and Kurds have already had the opportunity to experience this “tolerance”, distributed with bullets. The interests of the Sunni Syrian bourgeoisie, represented by the current regime, have therefore led Osama bin Laden’s grandchildren to establish good relations with US imperialism and to seek them with Israel.

The Palestinians, forced to survive in a sort of separate and formally independent cantons, as were the South African Bantustans, are being offered the creation of their own independent state. Even if these cantons are not annexed by Israel and this state ends up with a new puppet government in place of the old PNA, the conditions of the Palestinians will not change.

The Palestinian state, like Greater Israel, is just a mirage that the Palestinian and Israeli bourgeoisies use to maintain their rule, diverting the healthy and instinctive hatred that proletarians feel towards war and capitalist society against their class brothers in the other nation. There is no national solution for either the Palestinians or the Jews of Israel. The only solution is the united struggle of the Jewish and Palestinian proletariat against their respective bourgeoisies and their respective states or semi-states, for the communist revolution.

To those who consider themselves less “utopian” than us, it is easy to respond by showing where all the solutions devised by the policies of the bourgeoisie and opportunists have led.