Hamas – Internationalist Perspective

April 25, 2026April 30, 2026

Yes, It’s War

A monochromatic cubist painting depicting the chaos of war, featuring a screaming horse, a bull, a woman grieving over a dead child, and a figure trapped in flames. — Pablo Picasso, *Guernica*, 1937.

Barely three weeks into the Gaza conflict, Brazil’s president Lula declared “It’s not a war, it’s a genocide.” “End the genocide. It’s not a war,” Francesca Albanese told a UN committee in November 2024. “There is no war. It’s a misnomer to call it a war,” said the genocide historian Omer Bartov in April 2025. More than two years into the devastation of Gaza, the refrain has become a formula. It is repeated by generals and presidents, by jurists and historians, by aid workers standing over the bodies of their colleagues, by columnists and street marchers. This refrain is meant to register the scale of the slaughter and the asymmetry of force, and to refuse the sanitizing language of self-defense and military necessity. But the refrain is wrong. Gaza is a war. Seeing that clearly is part of seeing the world that produces it, and only from there can any real struggle against that world begin.

The “not a war” formula is an appeal to courts, sanctions, humanitarian intervention — to the international order, as if somewhere in it there were states willing and able to stop this. But the states with the power to act are the states facilitating the war: their diplomats publicly urge restraint in Gaza while their defense ministries renew Israel’s weapons contracts. The order was designed not to prevent violence but to regulate which states may exercise it. Two and a half years in and more than a hundred thousand dead^{^[1]}, the order has produced a few symbolic restrictions, a few ministerial condemnations, and no willingness to cross Washington. The order to which the formula appeals was never going to stop this war.

What kept the major powers from fighting each other after 1945 was not the international order but nuclear deterrence: the certainty that direct war between them would be annihilation. The institutions built in the shadow of that threat took credit for a peace they did not produce. The wars continued anyway, displaced onto proxies and client states across three continents, but the great powers themselves did not fight. The USSR’s collapse ended the deadlock. For a few decades the United States ran the system alone, waging its wars under the old humanitarian vocabulary. That unipolar era is now over. The US no longer bothers to dress its dominance in the language of international law; it competes openly for hegemony, and so do its rivals. What were once suppressed rivalries are now open contests, and Gaza is one of them.

When the pretense of a rules-based international order is dropped, what remains is war. The “not a war” formula does not escape this war but takes one side in it. It strips the conflict of its political content in a particular way: Israel is reduced to a killing machine, Gaza to its victims. Hamas dissolves into the mass of Gazan suffering. Armed factions, class divisions, foreign patrons all vanish, and what remains is babies, mothers, families, the People as such. This image depends on a mystification: that the ruled and their rulers are united in a single national interest and political will. But Hamas is the government and army that rules Gaza, with its own war aims, its own backers, and its own willingness to sacrifice those under its rule.

The militant form of this mystification elevates Hamas rather than dissolving it; its violence becomes the authentic self-assertion of a subjugated people. The mirror image of Israel’s doctrine of self-defense is the ready-made line that an oppressed nation has the right to achieve statehood by any means, and that the killing of a thousand Israelis^{^[2]} was therefore a revolutionary act. “It’s not a war,” said IDF general Itai Veruv within days of the October 7th attack. “It’s not a battlefield. It’s a massacre.” Both sides identify Hamas with Gaza as a whole: one to justify armed resistance, the other to justify collective punishment. It is the same nationalist ideology wearing a different uniform. One side fights for national security, the other for national liberation; both require the exploited to die for their rulers’ aims and to desire the enemy’s obliteration as the very object of victory. The working class — of Gaza, of Israel, of Lebanon, of Iran — has nothing to gain from any side of this war.

Geoff Butler, Happy Days Are Here Again, 1983

A war, then. Not because its violence is legitimate, symmetrical, or bound by the rules international humanitarian law claims to enforce. War is no duel between gentlemen. Overwhelming asymmetry does not make it something other than war, nor does the fact that most of the dead never held a rifle. War is organized armed conflict pursued for political ends by states and the armed organizations that serve or challenge them. Gaza meets that description on every count. Naming it a war does Israel no favors. It is a refusal of the pretense that this systematic mass murder belongs to some other, incomprehensible disaster, some catastrophic break with the normal functioning of this world.

And this is the normal functioning of the world. To call Gaza “not a war” is to treat it as exceptional, as if the killing there were fundamentally different from the killing this world treats as normal. Sanctions starve hundreds of thousands of children in Iraq and Syria under the label of diplomacy.^{^[3]} The drone strikes of the “war on terror” — legally reclassified as counterterrorism to facilitate the frictionless administration of death — killed people in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and Afghanistan for two decades. Border policy kills migrants by the thousands every year, turning deserts and seas into graveyards by design. People are crushed in warehouses and killed in the fields they pick, poisoned by the air they breathe and the water they drink, and consigned to die from the routine diseases of deprivation — and none of it counts as violence because no one fired a gun. None of this is an aberration. It is capitalism’s peace.

Nor is Gaza an isolated war. It is one front among many. Israel is simultaneously razing Gaza, tightening its hold on the West Bank, invading Lebanon, and bombing Iran. The October 7th attack helped scuttle the normalization deals between Israel and the Gulf states; Iran’s chokehold on the Strait of Hormuz threatens the world economy; the US drive to maintain hegemony in the Middle East is tested in Ukraine at the same time; Russia and China probe every crack in the same unstable field. This war is driven from elsewhere: in capitals, markets, and treaty rooms far beyond the strip. That elsewhere is not the backdrop; it is where the killing is decided. This is what it means to say modern war is interimperialist. The states competing within the system of global capital throw their weight onto every local conflict and convert it into a node in a planetary struggle for control. They move through arms contracts, basing agreements, currency flows, and the calculations of staff officers in distant capitals, and end in a particular apartment block in Khan Younis.

Chris Shaw Hughes, *Gaza/Syria Collage*, 2016

None of this requires denying that what is happening in Gaza is genocidal. But the legal machinery that distinguishes genocide from war does not exist to protect the people being killed. That definition exists to sort atrocity — to determine which mass killings will be prosecuted and which will be tolerated as the routine cost of doing business. The political aims driving the destruction of Gaza, the states and blocs backing it, the war economy sustaining it — none of these change depending on whether a court classifies the killing as war or genocide. It is the same conflict, driven the same way, producing the same dead. The reasons are not legal but historical.

In the twentieth century, war and genocide became intertwined through the development of capitalism’s accelerating capacity for destruction. The infrastructure of industrial war had been growing since the 1860s.^{^[4]} What the First World War added was not the technology but the scale. For the first time, the productive capacity of an entire economy determined whether a country could keep fighting. The front consumed ammunition faster than peacetime industry could produce it^{^[5]}, and every warring country was forced to turn its civilian economy into a munitions operation, conscripting labor and directing production at unprecedented scale.^{^[6]} The military conclusion followed directly: if the war effort begins in the factory and the bakery, then the machinist and the baker are both targets.

The Second World War put this conclusion into practice. Cities and their populations were deliberately destroyed as a means of breaking the productive base that sustained the enemy — a line that runs from Guernica through Hamburg and Tokyo to Hiroshima. By 1945 the distinction between combatant and noncombatant no longer constrained how wars were fought. Strategic doctrine could designate a whole society as a target, but producing the social will to carry out that destruction required something more. Here the logic of nationalism reached its extreme: entire societies were cast through racial categories as existential enemies whose destruction became not just a strategic but a moral necessity. The same process binds the attacking population together: shared hatred of the racial enemy is one of the most effective mechanisms for producing the national unity that total war demands. Genocidal racism and extermination are not deviations from capitalism’s normal functioning. The concentration camps are the hell of a world whose heaven is the supermarket.^{^[7]}

That hell has not closed. Gaza is not alone. The camps multiply. In Sudan, rival military factions have turned a war for control of the state into ethnic extermination in Darfur, with starvation deployed as a weapon and entire communities burned out. In Tigray, the Ethiopian government besieged an entire region and waged a war of annihilation against Tigrayans. In Myanmar, the military has been displacing and liquidating the Rohingya for years. None of these wars has been stopped by the institutions that claim jurisdiction over genocide and war crimes. All of them have long been called what they are: war, genocide, mass atrocity. The naming has not produced intervention, prosecution, or an end to the killing. Taken together with Gaza, they show that the twentieth century’s convergence of war and exterminatory violence has only deepened. The world’s powers are competing harder, over shrinking margins, with more weapons, and the wars they produce are growing more destructive.

The war with Iran makes this unmistakable. The excuse of Gaza’s density collapses in Iran, a country of eighty million with distributed cities and a standing army, where the same methods are producing the same carnage. In Minab, an American bomb hit an elementary school on the first day of the war and killed at least 175 people, most of them children.^{^[8]} Russia has made Ukrainian civilian infrastructure a primary military target. Israel leveled Gaza’s hospitals and schools over two years. Now the United States is doing the same in Iran, and its defense secretary is dismantling the institutional restraints that were supposed to prevent this: firing the military’s top legal advisors, closing the offices designed to respond to civilian harm, boasting about eliminating “stupid rules of engagement.” These restraints are being taken apart deliberately, because they are obstacles to the kind of wars these states intend to fight.

The great powers are arming themselves at scale. The war in Ukraine has ground into an industrial attrition contest decided by shell production, and Russia has built a war economy it cannot demobilize without triggering an economic and political crisis of its own. China has been preparing for years, massively expanding its navy, doubling its nuclear arsenal, and engineering its civilian industry to be a war economy on demand. Current wars have drained US munitions stockpiles, and the Pentagon is scrambling to rebuild mass-production capacity hollowed out by decades of preference for high-tech, low-volume systems. The shortfall is so great that the US is cutting back security commitments and pressuring its allies to rearm at a pace unseen since the Cold War.^{^[9]} The great powers are not yet at war with each other, but they are arming and preparing as if they expect to be, and the wars they are already fighting show what that preparation is for. The world is producing more Gazas, faster, with fewer restraints, and with larger wars on the horizon.

Oil painting "We Are Making a New Earth" by Paul Nash, depicting a desolate, mud-filled battlefield with shattered, leafless tree stumps under a cold, pale sun. — Paul Nash, *We Are Making a New Earth*, 1918

We say it is a war. We say so not to domesticate the horror or file it away as one more conflict among others. We do it to reject every position that treats this war as separable from the system that produces it. The campist identification with the resistance champions the local face of an imperialist bloc. The institutional appeal petitions a collective authority that has no means of enforcement independent of the states that arm the war. Calls for intervention, sanctions, or correct legal recognition are addressed to the UN; the great powers simply ignore them.

Every camp represents its campaign of destruction as necessity, defense, revenge, civilization, or even peace. Opposing the war by choosing a side in it is not opposition. It is recruitment. The internationalist position is a refusal of all these camps. No camp in this war, or in any of the wars now multiplying, represents the interests of the people fighting and dying in it. No army liberates the population in whose name it kills. Nationalist ideology — whether it calls itself patriotism, resistance, solidarity, or security — is how rulers get their subjects to willingly fight and die for them.

The forces producing these wars are enormous, and the present capacity to interrupt them is almost nonexistent. In a period of low working-class activity there is little use for strategic proposals. We are pro-revolutionaries; we cannot say how the final struggle would begin from where we stand, but we can say what is a dead end. A struggle that would actually threaten these wars could not be a campaign for a better international order, a coalition of “progressive” states against the dominant imperial bloc, or even a “workers’ semi-state” that marshals the proletariat^{^[10]} under a red flag. Each of these leaves intact the conditions that produce these wars. Only the working class can end what produces them: the state, capital, and the class relation that sustains both.

So long as capitalism persists, there is more of this to come. There will be more Gazas, more wars dressed as police actions or security operations or humanitarian interventions, more destruction of civilian life as the routine method of conflict between states whose rivalries intensify and whose restraints are being stripped away. The enemy is not this or that state, not this or that army, but capitalism itself, which destroys life in both war and peace. Every war depends on the willingness of the exploited to fight it. Every collective refusal — every mutiny, every strike against the war, every crack in the nationalist ideology that binds the working class to its rulers’ wars — is a crack in the machinery of war itself. The struggle against these wars requires the clarity to insist, against every camp and every flag, that what must be fought is not this or that war but the system that produces them: capitalism.

The official death toll records only identified or otherwise registered deaths and necessarily excludes many bodies still buried under rubble, deaths not reported to health authorities, and indirect deaths from hunger, disease, lack of clean water, exposure, and the destruction of medical infrastructure. By October 2025, Gaza’s Ministry of Health reported more than 67,000 killed and 169,000 injured; public-health researchers have repeatedly argued that this substantially undercounts both violent deaths and indirect deaths. A 2026 Lancet Global Health study estimated more than 75,000 violent deaths in the first sixteen months alone, with additional indirect deaths from malnutrition and untreated illness. On any accounting that includes siege-related mortality, the toll is plausibly well above 100,000. ↑
Approximately 1,200 people were killed in the October 7, 2023 Hamas-led attacks on Israel, primarily civilians and foreign nationals. While the vast majority were killed by the attackers, the IDF in several locations invoked the Hannibal Directive, a protocol to prevent abductions (and the resulting negotiation leverage) “at all costs.” The use of heavy weaponry against targets where militants and hostages were intermingled resulted in the “friendly fire” deaths of at least fourteen Israeli civilians. ↑
UNICEF estimated in 1999 that the UN sanctions on Iraq (1990–2003) had caused roughly 500,000 excess deaths of children under five. Sanctions regimes on Syria and elsewhere have been credibly linked to mass humanitarian crisis and substantial excess mortality, though causal attribution is complicated by the simultaneous effects of war, government policy, and infrastructural collapse. ↑
The industrial logistics of modern war were visible decades before 1914. The Crimean War (1853–56) combined rifled artillery, the railway, and the telegraph, allowing supplies and information to move at speeds that reshaped operations. The US Civil War (1861–65) was fought between two industrializing economies of unequal development (the North’s greater industrial capacity was decisive in its victory) and ended with Sherman’s March to the Sea, a campaign designed to destroy the South’s productive base and the population’s willingness to sustain the war. The Franco-Prussian War (1870–71) showcased Prussian railway mobilization at unprecedented scale and speed. What the First World War added was not these capacities but their systematic integration under state direction. ↑
Britain’s 1915 “shell crisis” is a useful shorthand for the moment when industrial capacity became visibly inseparable from military success. The crisis followed severe shortages of artillery shells on the Western Front and helped bring down the Liberal government, produce a coalition government, and create the Ministry of Munitions under Lloyd George. The lesson drawn by the state was that modern war could not be supplied by ordinary market coordination or peacetime procurement: labor, raw materials, factory output, and civilian consumption had to be subordinated to the needs of the front. Contemporary parliamentary debate already framed munitions as a national production problem, not merely a military supply problem. ↑
The state’s wartime command of production did not disappear with the armistice. The Ministry of Munitions in Britain, the War Industries Board in the United States, Germany’s Kriegsrohstoffabteilung, and similar apparatuses in every major belligerent pioneered techniques of labor direction, price control, and industrial planning that became permanent features of twentieth-century statecraft. After 1918 these apparatuses were partially dismantled but never fully dissolved; they were reactivated during the interwar depression and fully remobilized for the Second World War, after which state-directed capital allocation became the permanent condition of capitalist economies — whether under Soviet central planning, fascist corporatist direction, New Deal liberal-democratic management, or postwar social-democratic developmentalism. Tendencies toward concentration, monopoly, and state involvement in production predated 1914, but the First World War forced their consolidation into the institutional forms that have structured capitalism ever since. ↑
La Banquise, #1, 1983 ↑
“U.S. and Israeli Strikes Have Damaged Hundreds of Schools and Health Facilities in Iran,” The New York Times, April 22, 2026. ↑
NATO standards require member arsenals to conform to specifications that in practice mean buying American weapons, so the more Europe rearms, the larger the market for the US military-industrial complex. Trump’s various threats against NATO have been instrumental in extracting a European commitment to a 150% increase in military spending over the next decade, at the expense of the social wage. See Sanderr, “Is He Just Mad or is There a Strategy?”, Internationalist Perspective, February 2026 https://internationalistperspective.org/staging/3363/venezuela-greenland-minneapolis/ . ↑
The class that can be conscripted to the factory can be conscripted to the front. Any revolution that preserves labor as the condition of access to the social product preserves the dispossession that makes both forms of conscription possible. ↑

December 5, 2023December 20, 2023

Belicistas de izquierda y de derecha

El mundo observa horrorizado como uno de los ejércitos más avanzados del mundo destruye una zona urbana cerrada en gran parte indefensa como si disparara a peces en un barril. No es de extrañar que exista una indignación generalizada y un llamamiento mundial para detener esta locura. Pero en lugar de detener la guerra, muchos en la izquierda quieren que continúe, del lado de Hamás. Y quieren que ignoremos la violencia contra inocentes cometida por su bando porque se hizo por una buena causa. ¿Lo fue?

Los apologistas de Hamás afirman que su ejército es un luchador autóctono que se alza por la libertad contra una potencia colonial y que la historia de las guerras coloniales demuestra que estos conflictos son inevitablemente brutales, con muchas víctimas inocentes en ambos bandos. Depende de los “luchadores por la libertad” el decidir como libran su lucha, afirman, y quienes apoyan la liberación del “pueblo palestino” no deberían cuestionar sus métodos. Sobre todo si son blancos y viven en países que tenían colonias. La vergüenza por el comportamiento pasado o presente de “sus” países debería silenciar cualquier pensamiento crítico sobre las tácticas y los objetivos de la lucha “anticolonial”. No están bien situados “para dar lecciones de moral a la resistencia”.

Los apologistas del otro bando, los sionistas, utilizan exactamente el mismo argumento. La vergüenza por la pasada persecución antisemita de los judíos en Europa debe silenciar cualquier crítica al Estado sionista. Porque existió el Holocausto, porque existió la Naqba: cada bando afirma que la brutalidad que se les infligió justifica la brutalidad que utilizan.

Pero no es el color de tu piel ni tu país de nacimiento lo que determina si tu punto de vista es correcto o incorrecto.

Recuerdo una discusión que tuve en 1976 con amigos izquierdistas que decían que no debíamos criticar a los Jemeres Rojos de Pol Pot; como éramos europeos blancos no teníamos derecho a hacerlo. Según ellos, los Jemeres Rojos eran luchadores por la libertad; denunciarlos significaba apoyar al imperialismo estadounidense. Hoy, por supuesto, ya nadie busca excusas para los campos de exterminio de Pol Pot. Sí, pero eso era diferente, podrían objetar, el Jemer Rojo asesinaba sobre todo a su propia gente. Cierto. Pero también lo hace Hamás.

Como IP argumentó en “El mundo de muerte del capitalismo”, no se puede negar que Hamás sabía que su acción del 7 de octubre causaría muerte y destrucción masivas en Gaza y que decidieron friamente que valía la pena ese precio. ¿Somos todavía lo suficientemente humanos como para indignarnos por este sacrificio de muchos miles de seres humanos en aras de las ansias de poder de Hamás?

¿Por qué lucha Hamás?

¿Los “luchadores por la libertad” como Hamás y la Yihad Islámica luchan por la liberación? ¿Liberación de quién? ¿Serían libres los habitantes de Gaza y Cisjordania si vivieran en un Estado islamista de Hamás? ¿Qué significa eso, “Palestina libre”?

El objetivo y los medios están estrechamente relacionados. Todo lo que hace Hamás -reprimir violentamente las huelgas, encarcelar y torturar a opositores, asesinar a civiles, tomar como rehenes a niños y ancianos, etc.- demuestra cual es su objetivo: establecer un Estado fuerte que pisotee sin piedad las libertades de sus ciudadanos. El verano pasado hubo muchas protestas sociales en Gaza. Manifestaciones para exigir agua, electricidad, mejores salarios. Hamás las reprimió pero con menos violencia que en años anteriores (especialmente en Marzo 2019), como si temiera echar más leña al fuego. El espectacular estallido de Hamás del 7 de octubre siguió a ese caluroso verano. No es imposible establecer una conexión entre ambos acontecimientos. Hamás buscaba restaurar su prestigio, tanto en Gaza como en Cisjordania. Que esta acción tuviera esa consecuencia era una expectativa razonable. La impotencia de los palestinos, dice el experto en Palestina Emilio Minassian, “produce una lógica de doble resentimiento: deseo de reconocimiento por un lado y de venganza por otro”.

Hamás no es peor ni más brutal que el Estado Israelí. Ambos actúan desde una lógica similar que conduce al derramamiento de sangre de los inocentes. Pero como sus medios difieren, también lo hacen sus tácticas y estrategias. Se trata de un conflicto asimétrico. Por lo tanto, su brutalidad se expresa de diferentes maneras. Uno corta cabezas, el otro pone alfombras de bombas. Ambos son terroristas porque sembrar el terror es su principal objetivo. El miedo como arma política se está convirtiendo cada vez más en la norma de nuestro tiempo.

En ningún lugar del mundo existe un país que pertenezca “al pueblo”. En todas partes, la tierra y todo lo que hay en ella pertenece a sus dueños. No existe un solo ejemplo de lucha de liberación nacional que haya liberado al grueso de la población del hambre y la impotencia. Cada una de ellas ha sido una lucha entre entidades capitalistas y los izquierdistas siempre han tenido un bando al que apoyar.

Los mismos grupos de izquierda que ahora creen que oponerse al castigo colectivo de Gaza implica apoyar a Hamás, creían que oponerse a la guerra de Vietnam implicaba apoyar al Estado estalinista norvietnamita. Dos millones de personas murieron en esa guerra. Vietnam “ganó”. Ahora es un Estado policial que se ha convertido en un socio comercial y militar menor del país del que se “liberó”. Los vietnamitas ahora trabajan en fábricas para el mercado estadounidense con salarios más bajos que en China, llevando pañales para eliminar las pausas para ir al baño. Ahora pueden beber Coca-Cola en Hanoi. O Pepsi, hay libertad de elección.

Podríamos seguir con la lista, pero iríamos demasiado lejos. Evidentemente, esto no significa que los regímenes coloniales fueran mejores. Que el grueso de la población de la mayoría de los países liberados del yugo colonial viva en una gran miseria no se debe a su “liberación” nacional, sino a pesar de ella. Pero hace que uno se dé cuenta de que la lucha nacional no conduce a una liberación real. Al contrario, sobre todo en nuestros tiempos, es un obstáculo. Que se hayan abolido los regímenes coloniales con su racismo inherente es algo positivo. Pero incluso a partir de un avance innegable como la abolición del apartheid en Sudáfrica, tenemos que ver los límites. Se trata de un país donde la brecha entre ricos y pobres es una de las mayores del mundo, donde el desempleo es más alto que nunca, donde huelguistas son acribillados con ametralladoras, donde los trabajadores indocumentados son encarcelados… la lucha por la libertad real allí, aún no ha comenzado.

Turner y Bacon

Otro ejemplo utilizado por los apologistas de Hamás es la rebelión de Turner. Nat Turner era un esclavo que lideró una sangrienta rebelión en Virginia en 1831. Su objetivo era matar al mayor número posible de blancos. Familias enteras fueron masacradas. En su opinión, esta masacre, al igual que la de Hamás del 7 de octubre, no fue culpa de quienes la cometieron. Es -en la famosa frase de Franz Fanon- “la violencia del colonizador que se vuelve contra el opresor”.

Eso reduce a Turner y a Hamás a criaturas sin voluntad propia, autómatas que reflejan la violencia recibida como una pared refleja una pelota de tenis. Como si no tuvieran otra opción. Sin embargo, también hay ejemplos de levantamientos contra el opresor que no se convirtieron en guerras raciales o étnicas. La primera gran rebelión en América fue la de Bacon en 1676-1677. En ella, blancos pobres y esclavos negros lucharon juntos contra el gobierno colonial de Virginia. Capturaron la entonces capital, Jamestown. Sólo cuando llegó un ejército expedicionario de Inglaterra se pudo sofocar la rebelión.

Los esclavos negros y los proletarios blancos tenían los mismos intereses. Incluso dejando de lado el aspecto moral (y no quiero idealizar la rebelión de Bacon en este aspecto), debería quedar claro que los esclavos que lucharon con Bacon eligieron un método de lucha mucho más eficaz e inteligente que los que siguieron a Turner: una alianza basada en clases sociales con intereses comunes y no en el color de la piel o la religión. Los gobernantes coloniales también lo comprendieron. La rebelión de Bacon causó pánico en sus círculos. Era grande el temor de que blancos y negros sin poder, volvieran a luchar juntos. Poco después se introdujeron los Códigos de Esclavitud de Virginia, un sistema de apartheid que endurecía la naturaleza racial de la esclavitud y limitaba estrictamente el contacto entre blancos y negros.

La realidad ineludible es que los esclavos negros no pudieron emanciparse sin la ayuda de la clase trabajadora blanca, y la población negra actual de Estados Unidos también necesita desesperadamente esa solidaridad supra-racial. Lo mismo puede decirse de los palestinos. No pueden liberarse sin el apoyo de la clase obrera israelí. Y no pueden conseguirlo, como Turner, asesinando a tantos judíos como sea posible. Al igual que los que estaban en el poder tras la rebelión de Bacon hicieron todo lo posible para separar a blancos y negros, los que están en el poder en Israel/Palestina, los sionistas y los islamistas, están haciendo todo lo posible para enfrentar a judíos y árabes. Todo para impedir que los proletarios palestinos e israelíes descubran que tienen intereses comunes.

¿Se trata de una guerra anticolonial?

Israel, al igual que Estados Unidos, se creó mediante la colonización acompañada de la expulsión de la mayoría de la población original. Si se ponen uno al lado del otro mapas de diferentes años, se puede seguir de cerca el crecimiento de ambos países y la reducción del territorio de los “nativos”. Y continúa. Se aceleró en Jordania bajo el último gobierno de extrema derecha de Netanyahu y desde que comenzó la guerra actual ha ido a toda máquina, con los colonos como fanáticas tropas de choque. Como hizo Estados Unidos con los pueblos originarios, el Estado sionista quiere encerrar a todos los palestinos en reservas.

También hay un parecido ideológico con el colonialismo europeo, dice Minassian:

“Israel ha heredado la lógica europea que consiste en “animalizar” la mano de obra basándose en criterios raciales, trazando una barrera entre el mundo civilizado y el precivilizado. Este paradigma está en pleno apogeo en Israel, actualmente se está masacrando a la población de Gaza según esta lógica: se les entierra bajo bombas sin otro fin político que el de “apaciguarles”, recordarles la jerarquía que separa a los grupos humanos en esta parte del mundo. “Si un perro muerde, se dispara a la jauría”.

Y añadió: “Es importante recordar que los límites entre civilizado y animal son fluidos. Estaban y están activas dentro de la propia ciudadanía judeo-israelí. Los judíos árabes (mizrahis) o etíopes (fallashas) estuvieron durante mucho tiempo del lado equivocado de la valla y eran una especie de tropas auxiliares nativas utilizadas para apaciguar a los otros nativos”.

Pero también hay diferencias con las guerras coloniales. Estas últimas son entre una población originaria, dirigida por cuadros de la clase social superior indígena, y una potencia extranjera que controla el Estado y cosecha la mayor parte de los beneficios de la economía nacional. Una lucha entre dos países. Ese no es el caso en Israel/Palestina, afirma Minassian, y en ese sentido, dice, el conflicto no es colonial. Se trata, de hecho, de un país, una economía, centrada en Tel Aviv, de la que las ciudades de Cisjordania y Gaza son los empobrecidos suburbios marginales. Los gazatíes también utilizan dinero israelí, productos israelíes, documentos de identidad israelíes. Los proletarios palestinos e israelíes son segmentos de un mismo todo. Muchos palestinos de Cisjordania trabajan, legal o ilegalmente, en Israel y en las colonias. A menudo hablan hebreo, cuenta Minassian:

“Escuché durante tardes a jornaleros de uno de los campos de refugiados [de Cisjordania] contar como se produce la etnización de la mano de obra en las obras de la capital israelí: los promotores de la construcción son judíos asquenazíes, los palestinos israelíes reclutan trabajadores de los territorios ocupados, los capataces son judíos sefardíes que también hablan árabe, etc. Y luego están todos los demás proletarios importados: tailandeses, chinos, africanos que, como inmigrantes indocumentados, son en realidad los que están en la peor situación. Ninguno de estos grupos puede mezclarse entre sí, cada grupo tiene su propio estatus y su lugar distinto en las relaciones de producción.”

Desde su fundación, Israel, con ayuda principalmente estadounidense, ha avanzado a la velocidad del rayo. Gracias en parte a la utilización, entonces masiva, de la fuerza de trabajo palestina, se convirtió en una economía fuerte, un país muy desarrollado. Pero el fuerte crecimiento se detuvo en la década de 1980: desplome de la bolsa en 1983, inflación del 445% en 1984, déficit récord de la balanza de pagos. A ello siguió la disolución del Bloque del Este, que trajo consigo una inmigración masiva, especialmente de judíos rusos. Estos dos acontecimientos hicieron que la industria israelí necesitara mucha menos mano de obra palestina. El desempleo palestino se disparó. Israel se convirtió en puntero en la industria de alta tecnología pero, como ningún otro país entre los punteros, tiene una enorme cantidad de proletarios “innecesarios” a su cargo. En este sentido, Minassian ve en la economía israelo-palestina una metáfora de la economía mundial.

La respuesta del Estado israelí a esta situación es una política de segregación, de encerrar a los palestinos en enclaves y ceder su gestión a subcontratistas locales.

“Este gran cerco, esta operación de separación entre proletarios necesarios y sobrantes sobre una base étnico-religiosa, comenzó al mismo tiempo que el proceso de paz, que era en realidad un proceso de externalización del control social de los sobrantes”, afirma Minassian. El conflicto subsiguiente no es, por tanto, una guerra colonial:

“Estamos en una situación en la que se trata menos de la explotación de una población indígena que de la gestión de una población proletaria excedente, en proporciones únicas en los centros de acumulación capitalista. Por cada trabajador con contrato laboral en Israel, hay otro que se mantiene en uno de los grandes suburbios cerrados que forman los centros de asentamiento bajo jurisdicción palestina: la Franja de Gaza y las ciudades de Cisjordania. Son casi cinco millones de proletarios encerrados a pocos kilómetros de Tel Aviv, invisibles, viviendo de la venta de su fuerza de trabajo día a día, vigilados por soldados para que no salgan de sus celdas.”

Gaza, más que las ciudades y campos de refugiados cisjordanos , es un basural de la economía israelí. El desempleo juvenil supera allí el 70%, antes de la invasión. Todos esos trabajadores excedentes sobreviven en la economía marginal con la ayuda financiera de diversas fuentes, Israel incluido. Ese dinero lo distribuyen los subcontratistas, Hamás y la llamada Autoridad Palestina, que también desempeñan otras funciones estatales, principalmente el cumplimiento del “orden” pero también subiendo impuestos, obligando a jóvenes a alistarse en su ejército, sometiendo a otras bandas paramilitares, etc. Los subcontratistas compiten entre sí, tratando de recuperar su menguante control sobre el desilusionado público palestino. Al mismo tiempo, intentan reforzar su posición frente a su cliente, el Estado israelí. Según Minossian, es aquí donde debemos buscar la explicación de la estrategia de Hamás. Hamás quiere hacerse “indispensable”. Esto no tiene nada que ver con las luchas de liberación.

No es un conflicto local

Pero la dinámica interna en Israel-Palestina es sólo una parte de la historia. Se trata también de un conflicto geopolítico entre Estados Unidos y sus competidores.

La fundación de Israel vino acompañada de una oleada de descolonización cuando la presión estadounidense puso fin a la mayoría de los regímenes coloniales europeos tras la Segunda Guerra Mundial. Ambas fueron el resultado de un desplazamiento del poder mundial de Europa a Estados Unidos. Una colonia blanca militarizada con un poderoso ejército equipado con armas americanas encajaba perfectamente en los planes geopolíticos estadounidenses para Medio Oriente. Y a medida que crecía la importancia de la riqueza petrolífera, también aumentaba la importancia de Israel para Washington. Desde sus inicios y todavía hoy, el marco geopolítico determina lo que ocurre en Israel-Palestina. En ese sentido, tampoco se trata de una guerra colonial, sino de un conflicto interimperialista. Escribimos más sobre esto en el artículo anterior, “El mundo de muerte del capitalismo”. La política estadounidense de formar una fuerte alianza proestadounidense en torno a Israel y Arabia Saudí contra Irán fue un factor importante. Irán es el principal proveedor del ala militar de Hamás (el ala política “más moderada” está financiada por Qatar), al igual que Estados Unidos es el principal proveedor de las Fuerzas de Defensa de Israel. La mayor parte del dinero y las armas utilizadas para librar la guerra proceden de otros países. Sólo las bajas son locales.

En dicho artículo, señalábamos la falta de perspectiva de la economía mundial. La crisis sistémica está desestabilizando, sacudiendo los equilibrios existentes. El aumento del armamento y de los conflictos militares es una tendencia mundial. Los frentes congelados se derriten, vuelven a activarse: en Ucrania, en África, en Karabagh y ahora en Gaza. No se trata de nuevos conflictos, sino de conflictos ya existentes que de repente recrudecen.Es de esperar que en los próximos años exploten más polvorines.

Cómo gestionar y controlar el excedente se está convirtiendo cada vez más en un problema central del orden mundial capitalista. Israel puede ser un precursor en este sentido. Lo que está ocurriendo ahora en Gaza, según Minassian, “no es una guerra, sino el control del proletariado excedente por medios militares equivalentes a una guerra total, por parte de un Estado democrático y civilizado que forma parte del bloque central de acumulación”. Los miles de muertos en Gaza, continuó, “pintan un cuadro aterrador del futuro – de las próximas crisis del capitalismo”.

Ese capitalismo parece haber entrado en un nuevo periodo en el que la guerra desempeña un papel cada vez más importante. Un período en el que aprendemos a admirar a los soldados y a los “luchadores por la libertad”, a aplaudir o a hacer la vista gorda ante los asesinatos en masa, a considerar normales la muerte y la destrucción por la patria, a tomar partido en conflictos en los que la gente corriente es siempre la perdedora.

La liberación no vendrá a través de la guerra y los ataques terroristas, sino a través de la solidaridad y la conciencia de los intereses comunes del trabajador colectivo, independientemente de su color o credo. Cuando las alcancemos sabremos que hacer. Cualquier cosa que impida su crecimiento se interpone en el camino de la liberación. En primer lugar, el nacionalismo, la separación de las personas por motivos étnicos, religiosos o raciales. Así que, fuera esas banderas palestinas e israelíes, fuera eslóganes como “Palestina será libre, del río al mar”: eso es un grito de guerra, no un llamamiento a detener la guerra. Detener la guerra en lugar de luchar en ella, esa debería ser la primera exigencia ahora. ¡Armisticio ya! Liberación de los rehenes y presos, ¡ya! Desbloqueo de Gaza ¡ya! Detener los pogromos en Cisjordania ¡ya! Basta de dolor, basta de sangre, ¡construyamos la solidaridad sobre una base antinacionalista!

Sanderr .15-11-2023

*Este mural y el de arriba son obras de Banksy en Gaza*

November 19, 2023December 3, 2023

WARMONGERS LEFT AND RIGHT

The world watches in horror as one of the most advanced armies on earth is destroying a mostly defenseless enclosed urban zone, like shooting fish in a barrel. No wonder there is widespread outrage and a worldwide demand to stop this madness. But rather than to stop the war, many leftists want to continue it, on the side of Hamas. And they want us to ignore the violence against innocents committed by their side because it was done for a good cause. Was it?

The apologists of Hamas claim that its army are indigenous freedom fighters rising up against a colonial power and that the history of colonial wars shows that these conflicts are inevitably brutal, with many innocent victims on both sides. It is up to the ‘freedom fighters” to decide how they wage their struggle, they claim, and those who support the liberation of “the Palestinian people” should not question their methods. Especially not if they are white and living in countries which had colonies themselves. Shame about the past or present behavior of “their” countries should silence any critical thought on the tactics and goals of the “anti-colonial” struggle. They are not well placed “to hand out moral lessons to the resistance.”

The apologists of the other side, the Zionists, use exactly the same argument. Shame about the past anti-Semitic persecution of Jews in Europe must silence any critique of the Zionist state. Because there was the Holocaust, because there was the Naqba: each side claims that the brutality inflicted on them justifies the brutality they use.

But it is not your skin color or country of birth which determines whether your point of view is right or wrong.

I remember a discussion I had back in 1976 with leftist friends who said we should not criticize Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge; because we were white Europeans we had no right to do so. According to them the Khmer Rouge were freedom fighters; denouncing them meant supporting US. imperialism. Today, of course, nobody seeks excuses for Pol Pot’s killing fields anymore. Yes but that was different, they might object, the Khmer Rouge mostly murdered its own people. Right. But so does Hamas.

As IP argued in “Capitalism’s Death World”, there is no denying that Hamas knew that its October 7 action would cause mass death and destruction in Gaza and that they chillingly decided that it was worth the price. Are we still human enough to be outraged about this sacrifice of many thousands of fellow human beings for Hamas’ lust for power?

What is Hamas fighting for?

Are “freedom fighters” like Hamas and Islamic Jihad fighting for liberation? Liberation of whom from what? Would the residents of Gaza and the West Bank be free if they lived in an Islamist Hamas state? What does that mean, “Palestine free”?

Goal and means are closely linked. Everything Hamas does – violently suppressing strikes, imprisoning and torturing opponents, killing civilians, taking children and the elderly hostage, etc. – shows what its goal is: to establish a strong state that ruthlessly tramples on the freedoms of its citizens. This past summer there were many social protests in Gaza. Demonstrations demanding water, electricity, better wages. Hamas suppressed those, but less violently than in previous years (especially in March 2019), as if they were afraid to throw oil on the fire. The spectacular Hamas outbreak of Oct. 7 followed that hot summer. A connection between the two events is not impossible. Hamas was seeking to restore its prestige, both in Gaza and the West Bank. That this action would have that consequence was a reasonable expectation. The powerlessness of the Palestinians, says the Palestine expert Emilio Minassian, “produces a logic of double resentment: desire for recognition on the one hand and for revenge on the other.”

Hamas is no worse or more cruel than the Israeli state. They both act from a similar logic that leads to the blood shedding of the innocent. But as their means differ, so do their tactics and strategies. It is an asymmetrical conflict. Therefore, their brutality expresses itself in different ways. One chops off heads, the other lays bomb carpets. Both are terrorists because sowing terror is their main goal. Fear as a political weapon is becoming more and more the norm in our time.

*civilians killed by Hamas (photo Reuters)*

*Gaza neighborhood pulverized by the IDF (photo Reuters)*

Nowhere in the world is there a country that belongs to “the people.” Everywhere the land and everything on it belongs to the owners. There is not a single example of a national ‘liberation’ struggle that freed the bulk of the population from hunger and powerlessness. Every one of them has been a struggle between capitalist entities and the leftists always had a side to support.

The same leftist groups who now believe that opposing the collective punishment of Gaza implies supporting Hamas, believed that opposing the war in Vietnam implied supporting the North Vietnamese Stalinist state. Two million people died in that war. Vietnam “won”. Now it is a police state that has become a junior commercial and military partner of the country from which it “liberated” itself. Vietnamese now work in factories for the American market at wages lower than in China, with diapers on to cut toilet breaks. They now can drink coca-cola in Hanoi. Or pepsi, there’s freedom of choice.

We could go down the list of national “liberations” but that would lead us too far. Obviously, this does not mean that colonial regimes were better. That the bulk of the population in most countries that were freed from the colonial yoke live in great misery is not because of, but in spite of their national “liberation.” But it makes clear that national struggle is by definition a bourgeois struggle that does not lead to true liberation. On the contrary, especially in our time, it is an obstacle. That colonial regimes with their inherent racism were abolished is a good thing. But even of an undeniable advance such as the abolition of Apartheid in South Africa, we must see the limits. This is a country where the gap between rich and poor is among the largest in the world, where unemployment is higher than ever, where strikers are mowed down with machine guns, where undocumented workers are thrown in jail… the struggle for real freedom there has yet to begin.

Turner and Bacon

Another example used by the apologists for Hamas is the Turner rebellion. Nat Turner was a slave who led a bloody rebellion in Virginia in 1831. His goal was to kill as many whites as possible. Entire families were slaughtered. In their view, this massacre, like the Hamas massacre of October 7, was not the fault of those who committed it. It is, as Franz Fanon put it, “the violence of the colonizer that turns against the oppressor.”

That reduces Turner and Hamas to creatures with no will of their own, no agency, just automatons that reflect the violence received like a wall reflects a tennis ball. As if they had no other choice. However, there are also examples of uprisings against oppression that did not become racial or ethnic wars. The first major rebellion in America was the Bacon Rebellion in 1676-1677. In it, poor whites and black slaves fought together against the colonial government in Virginia. They captured the then capital city of Jamestown. Only when an expeditionary army arrived from England could the rebellion be suppressed.

Black slaves and white proletarians had the same interests. Even leaving aside the moral aspect (and I certainly do not want to idealize the Bacon rebellion on that score), it should be clear that the slaves who fought with Bacon chose a much more efficient and intelligent method of struggle than those who followed Turner: an alliance based on social classes with common interests rather than on skin color or religion. The colonial powers understood this, too. The Bacon rebellion caused panic in their circles. The fear was great that white and black powerless people would fight together again. Soon after, the Virginia Slave Codes were introduced, an apartheid system that hardened the racial nature of slavery and strictly limited contact between white and black.

The inescapable reality is that the black slaves could not emancipate themselves without the help of white working class and that the black proletariat in the US. today desperately needs that supra-racial solidarity as well. The same is true for the Palestinians. They cannot liberate themselves without the support of the Israeli working class. And they cannot acquire it by, à la Turner, murdering as many Jews as possible. Just as those in power after the Bacon rebellion did everything in their power to drive white and black apart, those in power in Israel-Palestine, the Zionists and the Islamists, are doing their utmost to pit Jews and Arabs against each other. Anything to prevent Palestinian and Israeli proletarians from discovering that they have common interests.

Is this an anti-colonial war?

Israel, like the US, was created by settling mostly white Europeans on land from which most of the existing inhabitants were expelled. If you put maps from different years side by side, you can closely follow the growth of both countries and the shrinking of the territory of the “natives”. And this expulsion of natives continues. It accelerated on the West Bank under the latest hard-right Netanyahu government, and since the current war began it has been in overdrive, with the settlers as fanatical shock troops. As the US did with the Indians, the Zionist state wants to lock up Palestinians in reservations. However, Israel is not a colonial power extending its territory, it already controls the territory. What it does is managing its inhabitants, pushing them in different zones that will assure their division and thus the dominance of the state.

So while the tactics may be similar, this is not a colonial war. But as Minassian points out, there is also an ideological similarity to European colonialism:

“Israel has inherited the European logic, which consists of “animalizing” the workforce based on racial criteria, drawing a barrier between the civilized and the pre-civilized world. This paradigm is in full swing in Israel; people in Gaza are currently being slaughtered according to this logic: they are being buried under bombs with no other political purpose than to “appease” them, to remind them of the hierarchy that separates human groups in this part of the world. A dog bites, you shoot the pack.”
He adds, “It is important to remember that the boundaries between civilized and animal are fluid. They were and are active within the Israeli-Jewish citizenship itself. Arab Jews (mizrahis) or Ethiopians (fallashas) were for a long time on the wrong side of the fence and were a kind of native auxiliary troops used to appease the other natives.”

But colonial wars are between an indigenous population, led by cadres from the indigenous social upper class, and a foreign power that controls the state and reaps the bulk of the profits of the domestic economy. A struggle between two countries. That is not the case in Israel-Palestine, Minassian says, and in that sense, he says, the conflict is not colonial. It is, de facto, about one country, one economy, centered in Tel Aviv, of which the cities on the West Bank and Gaza are the impoverished marginalized suburbs. Gazans also use Israeli money, Israeli products, Israeli identity cards. Palestinian and Israeli proletarians are segments of the same whole. Many Palestinians from the west bank work, legally or illegally, in Israel and in the colonies. They often speak Hebrew. Minassian recounts:

“I listened for evenings to day laborers from one of the refugee camps [on the West Bank] who told me how the ethnicization of the labor force takes place on the construction sites of the Israeli capital: the construction promoters are Ashkenazi Jews, the Palestinian Israelis provide the recruitment of laborers from the occupied territories, the foremen are Sephardic Jews who also speak Arabic, etc. And then there are all the other imported proletarians: Thais, Chinese, Africans, who as undocumented immigrants are actually the worst off. None of these groups can mix with each other, each group has its own status and distinct place in the relations of production.”

Since its founding, Israel, with mainly American help, has advanced at lightning speed. Thanks in no small part to the then massive use of Palestinian labor power, it became a strong economy, a highly developed country. But the strong growth stalled in the 1980s: stock market crash in 1983, inflation of 445 percent in 1984, record balance of payments deficit. This was followed by the dissolution of the Eastern Bloc, which brought massive immigration, especially of Russian Jews. Those developments meant that Israeli industry needed much less Palestinian labor. Palestinian unemployment skyrocketed. Israel became a front runner in high-tech industry but, like no other country among the front runners, has a huge amount of “unusable” proletarians to its charge. In this sense, Minassian sees in the Israeli-Palestinian economy a metaphor for the global economy.

The Israeli state’s response to that situation was a policy of separation, of enclosing Palestinians in enclaves and handing over management of them to local subcontractors.

“This great enclosure, this operation of separation between useful and surplus proletarians on an ethno-religious basis, began at the same time as the peace process, which in reality was a process of externalization of the social control of the superfluous,” Minassian says. So, in contrast to a colonial conflict

“We find ourselves in a situation where it is less about the exploitation of an indigenous population than about the management of a surplus proletarian population, in proportions unique to the centers of capitalist accumulation. For every worker with a labor contract in Israel, there is another who is maintained in one of the large closed suburbs under Palestinian jurisdiction: the Gaza Strip and West Bank cities. Those are nearly five million proletarians parked a few kilometers from Tel Aviv, invisible, living off the sale of their labor power from day to day, guarded by soldiers so they don’t leave their cage.”

Gaza, more so than the West Bank cities and refugee camps, is a garbage bin of the Israeli economy. Youth unemployment there exceeds 70 percent (before the current invasion). All those surplus workers survive in the marginal economy with financial help from various sources, Israel included. That money is distributed by the subcontractors, Hamas and the so-called Palestinian Authority, which also perform other state functions, primarily maintaining “order” but also raising taxes, forcing young men into their army, subduing other para-military bands etc. The subcontractors compete with each other, trying to regain their waning grip on the disillusioned Palestinian public. At the same time, they seek to strengthen their position against their client, the Israeli state. According to Minassian, therein we must look for the explanation of Hamas’ strategy. Hamas wants to make itself “incontournable”. This has nothing to do with liberation struggle.

Not a local conflict

But the internal dynamics in Israel-Palestine are only part of the story. It is also a geopolitical conflict between America and its challengers.

Israel’s creation was accompanied by a wave of decolonization, as American pressure ended most European colonial regimes after World War II. Both were the result of a global power shift from Europe to the US. A militarized white colony with a powerful, American-equipped army fitted perfectly in the US. geopolitical plans for the Middle East. And as the importance of oil resources grew, so did Israel’s importance to Washington. From the beginning, and still today, the geopolitical framework determines what happens in Israel-Palestine. In this sense, too, it is not a colonial war, but an inter-imperialist conflict. We wrote more on this in the previous article, “Capitalism’s Death World”.The US policy of forming a strong pro-American alliance around Israel and Saudi Arabia against Iran has been an important factor. Iran is the patron of the military wing of Hamas (the “more moderate” political wing is funded by Qatar), just as the US is the patron of the IDF. Most of the money and weapons used in the war come from other countries. Only the casualties are local.

In that article, we pointed out the lack of perspective of the capitalist world order; the certainty that its crisis will deepen. The systemic crisis is destabilizing the world, is shaking existing equilibria. The rise of armament expenditures and of military conflicts is a global trend. Frozen fronts are melting, become active again: in Ukraine, in Africa, in Karabagh and now in Gaza. Not new conflicts but existing ones that suddenly flare high. It is to be expected that more powder kegs will explode in the coming years.

How to manage and control the unusable parts of the labor force becomes more and more a central problem in the capitalist world order. Israel may be a forerunner in that regard. What is happening now in Gaza, according to Minassian, is “not war, but the control of the surplus proletariat with military means corresponding to total war, by a democratic, civilized state that is part of the central accumulation bloc.” The thousands of deaths in Gaza, he continued, “paint a terrifying picture of the future – of the coming crises of capitalism.”

Capitalism seems to have entered a new period in which war plays a growing role. A period in which we learn to admire soldiers and ‘freedom fighters’, applaud or turn a blind eye to mass murder, consider death and destruction for the fatherland normal, and take sides in conflicts in which ordinary people are always the losers.

Liberation will not come through war and terrorist attacks but through solidarity and consciousness of the common interests of the collective worker, regardless color or creed. When we reach those we will know what to do. Everything that hinders their growth stands in the way of true liberation. First and foremost, nationalism, separation of people on an ethno-religious or racial basis. So down with those Palestinian and Israeli flags, down with slogans like “Palestine will be free, from the river to the sea”: that is a war cry, not a call to stop the war. Stopping the war instead of fighting in it, that must be the first demand now. Cease-fire now! Release the hostages now! Unlock Gaza now! Stop the pogroms on the West Bank now! No to antisemitism, no to islamophobia! Enough pain, enough blood, build solidarity on an anti-nationalist basis!

Sanderr

11/15/2023

*This mural and the one on top are made by Banksy in Gaza*

October 22, 2023October 24, 2023

CAPITALISM’S DEATH WORLD

On the very first day of Hamas’ sadistic rampage, the Israeli authorities took to the microphones to declare to the world that this was Israel’s 9/11. And indeed, there are some striking similarities. Between the tactics and goals of Al Qaeda and Hamas, as well as between the imperialist opportunities their actions created for the US and Israel.

Both Al Qaeda and Hamas attacked civilians indiscriminately. Both are guided by an Islamist ideology¹, based on myths of a glorious past and an even better future in heaven, feeding on the anger and resentment that poverty, repression, and discrimination amply produce. What do they want? A real state, a vast territory under their control, ruled not by “the people” but by themselves, a state that imprisons and tortures anyone who dares to disagree (as Hamas does in Gaza), claiming their authority cannot be challenged because it is sanctified by religious dogma. They have utter contempt for human life, including sometimes their own. They are a clear expression of the death culture that capitalism in this epoch produces. They are racist, not in the strict sense of classifying people on the basis of skin color, but in the broader meaning of dehumanizing people on the basis of their “otherness”, the conditions under which they are born, like their ethnicity or culture. But they are not only contemptuous for the life of Jews and other non-believers in their jealous god, the life of “their own people” has no value for them either. Both Al Qaeda and Hamas knew that their attacks would provoke ferocious reactions but that’s precisely what they wanted. They calculated that they would politically benefit from the immense suffering that these responses would bring to Muslims. And in the case of Hamas, for Gazans in particular. The cruelties Hamas committed during its onslaught were probably not just sadism but a calculated tactic to elicit a maximally brutal Israeli invasion. This was entirely predictable, as Israel has always followed a doctrine of disproportionality for deterrence. Even before the state was founded, Jewish militias embraced it when dealing with the Arabs in Mandatory Palestine. Ever since, when Jewish civilians were killed, many more Palestinian civilians have always died in retaliation. So Hamas knew very well that their attack would cause the death of many thousands of civilians in Gaza. Its hope is that this will help it to win in its struggle against its direct competitor, Fatah, for control over the Palestinian proto-state.

Hell

The other similarity between 9/11 and the Hamas-massacre is that they both provided golden opportunities for the attacked nations. No doubt there will be speculations again that the victimized state allowed this to happen for its political benefit: the sadness and rage, the thirst for revenge, the patriotic unity, and the frenzy stoked by the media create a blank check for military actions for which it could not get enough support otherwise. Gone are the internal divisions, the opposition to the government, and the concerns about Netanyanu’s corruption and power grab; crushing the enemy is now all that counts.

The US state used the opportunity to invade two countries and to vastly expand its means of control over society. It spent over 8 trillion dollars on these wars. Was it worth it? Many bourgeois politicians and pundits, including the president, who supported these wars then, changed their minds (but now support new wars). We can’t ask the more than 900.000 people who died in these wars what they think of it.²

Israel’s goal is no different from what it was before: to expand. The current government was focused on absorbing more territory on the West Bank, step by step. It is exploiting the current war to accelerate that process. But it had less interest in taking Gaza. There’s nothing there for it, only superfluous people. It’s a holding pen. A ghetto full of children and grandchildren of people chased out of Palestine. Full of traumatized young people with no perspective, no freedom to leave this open-air prison, constantly bombarded with nationalist propaganda, seduced by the macho violent culture of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, like kids in the inner cities are recruited by gangs. A thorn in Israel’s side.

In the first week since this crisis began, Israel threw 6000 bombs on Gaza (an area about the size of Newark, New Jersey), as much as the US dumped on Afghanistan in an entire year. And the invasion hasn’t started yet. Netanyahu has vowed a retaliation that will “reverberate for generations” among Israel’s enemies. The Israeli general Ghassan Aliyan warned, “You wanted hell—you will get hell.” Defense Minister Yoav Gallant declared, “We are fighting human animals, and we act accordingly.” None of them made any effort to distinguish between Hamas militants and the 2 million plus Palestinian civilians in Gaza. The “human animals” comment is telling. For decades, and especially in recent years, the people of Gaza have indeed been treated like animals. Perhaps not surprisingly, the gangsters ruling this prison indeed acted like animals when they broke out and attacked southern Israel. So now Israel will triple down on the dehumanization and collective punishment of all of these “human animals.” It is clear that civilians are not just risking to be collateral damage in this onslaught, they are targeted as well. Israel ordered the civilians in the northern half of the strip to evacuate to the south and then bombed people who did so. It bombed ambulances, schools, mosques, apartment buildings, and the US made sure it had all the military hardware to do so. It deprived the civilian population of water, food, medicine, and electricity. And all the leaders of the West who screamed “war crime!” when Russia did similar things in Ukraine now have nothing to say on the subject. This shouldn’t surprise us: “human rights” is just a pawn in their power game.

EU-chief Ursula Von der Leyen tweeting her selective outrage

By dehumanizing all Palestinians and inflicting collective punishment on them, the Israeli state shows that it is as racist as Hamas. If it could, perhaps it would follow the advise of US Senator Lindsey Graham who recommended to “level the place”. But it can’t kill all Gazans and it can’t push them into Egypt either. So there still will be a Gaza when this round is over. It seems that the main objective of the Israeli offensive is to make those who survive it so fearful that it might happen again that Hamas and similar gangs will lose all support. Whether that would work is doubtful. Fear holds people back when they have something to live for, but when they feel they have nothing to lose, rage can overpower it.

Why now?

The current violence is nothing new but it’s an escalation the world did not expect. Like how the tension between Russia and the West was nothing new, but the war over Ukraine was an escalation that was a surprise to most. The tension in the Caucasus was old but the ethnic cleansing of Nagorno-Karabakh is new. In Africa too, there is an escalation of wars and military coups. Tensions are mounting around the globe. Armament spending is rising everywhere³. Why now?

The global context of this trend is a capitalist world economy in crisis and this crisis heightens the antagonisms that are intrinsic to the system. Not only the antagonism between rich and poor, and between capitalist and working class, but also the antagonisms between competing capitalist entities, between hegemonic and contender states. If the working class does not recognize itself as a class with common interests against capital, it is the latter antagonisms that will dominate the world scene, and the antagonism between rich and poor will just be fodder for the ideological discourse of war.

The more the crisis deepens, and is fanned by the effects of the climate-change which is accelerating, the more contender states have an incentive to challenge the dominant power, in our times, the US. The US response is to defeat contenders by isolating them, by building strong US-allied coalitions around them. Thus it has isolated Russia by integrating former republics of the USSR into its sphere, culminating in the fight over Ukraine; it has joined with Japan, South Korea and Vietnam in a military alliance that has been dubbed the Asian NATO; and in the Middle East, it has brokered agreements between Israel and several Arab states (the ‘Abraham accords’). The crowning achievement was supposed to be the diplomatic normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia. For Iran, Hamas’ main backer, this agreement would be a major strategic setback. Should Israel, the most potent U.S. military partner in the region, and Saudi Arabia, Washington’s most financially powerful and religiously influential one, normalize and build cooperation, Tehran would face an integrated pro-American camp. American partners, including the UAE, Bahrain, Egypt, and Jordan, would effectively ring the Arabian Peninsula, securing control of the Red Sea, the Arabian Sea, and the Persian Gulf through their three maritime choke points: the Suez Canal, the Bab el-Mandab Strait, and the Straits of Hormuz. This would largely block Iran’s imperialist regional aspirations for now. Well at least they got that much: the agreement is off since for the foreseeable future it would be too “awkward” for an Arab state to strike a deal with Israel.

There is no ‘national liberation’

Wars in our epoch are about different capitalist entities claiming ownership of the same piece of real estate. The choice presented to the inhabitants of Palestine/Israel is either a Zionist Apartheid-state or an Islamist Apartheid-state. The thought that people there could live without either is inconceivable for those who define the choice. It is inconceivable as well for most people demonstrating against Israel or against Hamas, waving their respective national flags. While revulsion of injustice may be what originally motivated them, they are propagandists of war. War for Israel, war for Palestine, in which rivers of blood of ordinary Palestinians and Israelis are shed for the power games of states and proto-states. They ignore the atrocities committed by their own side and act as apologists for the murder of innocents. For the SJP (Students for Justice in Palestine) which has a sizable presence on American campuses, there are no innocent Israelis, they’re all occupiers, and nobody can criticize Hamas because it has “the right to resist the occupation of their land by whatever means they deem necessary”, as a recent SJP-resolution declared. Means that include killing babies, raping women, burning corpses, torturing prisoners, kidnapping children, etc.

Let us be clear: there is no such thing as national liberation in our epoch. Humankind is facing Capital as a totality, a global machine, of which nations can only be a part. At most, ‘national liberation’ can achieve the right for a local bourgeoisie to choose out of which larger powers it wants to be a vassal. But always, with no exception, national liberation means that the exploited must support exploiters of their national origin against the foreign enemy. There is no liberation for the working class through national liberation movements. Quite the contrary: these movements are major obstacles to a movement that could lead to real liberation. A movement that fights for the real interests of the proletarians living in Israel/Palestine and overcomes the divisions imposed on them to attack the real source of their misery: capitalism and its states, which have nothing to offer them but exploitation, pauperization, and war. A fight not to decide who possesses what but to abolish possession, to ground society on meeting human needs instead of on the accumulation of possessions and profit.

The global working class, which is the only social force that can generate such a movement, is not defeated, as the increase of big strikes in the last two years shows. But it’s not fully awake either, drugged as it is by relentless nationalist indoctrination which rarely explicitly but always implicitly instructs us that “the other people”, who are not part of “our” tribe, are less important, less human. Especially so in Israel and Palestine.

In the whole Middle East poverty has sharply increased in recent years. It is full of people who have been made superfluous by capital. Millions of them have been killed in wars. How many more will have to die for the nation before the madness stops? The worsening of living conditions in the West Bank and Gaza has been obvious but the proletariat in Israel has not escaped this reality either. There’s not only the constant threat of violence but also pauperization. One-third of Israeli children now live in poverty while the concentration of wealth is the second highest of all developed countries. Objective reasons are enough for workers in both places to stand up against their rulers and join forces. Even though this perspective may seem impossible at this point in time, it is the only way out of this deadly spiral of ever more catastrophes.

INTERNATIONALIST PERSPECTIVE

10/20/2023

1 As MacIntosh wrote in “Islamism: Political ideology and movement” in International Perspective 39 (2001): While Islamism appears to be an ideology and political movement that is adamantly opposed to modernity, and which seeks to reinvigorate traditional Islamic beliefs and institutions, it is very much the product of the destruction of the pre-capitalist Arab-Islamic world, and both as ideology and political project is irretrievably stamped with the imprint of modernity and capitalism. (In this respect, Islamism has much in common with Nazism, with its ideological recourse to a pre-capitalist Gemeinschaft, and Aryan religion, even while it instantiated the most brutal realities of capitalism and imperialism in its social relations and political project.)

2 See the Brown University report: Costs of the 20-year war on terror: $8 trillion and 900,000 deaths . This figure does not include the many deaths that were an indirect result of these wars, such as disease, displacement and loss of access to food or clean drinking water.

3 $ 2.2 trillion in 2022. In his television speech on Gaza (10/20), Biden shamelessly boasted how all these wars create “many good jobs” in the American military industry.