Palestinian People in the Grip of Imperialist War

On 7 October, several Palestinian organisations, led by Hamas, launched a major attack on Israel from Gaza. In a short period of time, nearly 5 thousand rockets were thrown into the Israeli territory and thousands of Palestinians, including paramotor and motorbike militants crossed the border. They carried out military actions in Israeli territory, and captured many Israelis. Israel, on the other hand, with the declaration that “we will leave no stone unturned”, embarked on an uninterrupted bombardment of Gaza from land, air and sea. With hundreds of casualties on both sides, the death toll has already reached 3,000 and thousands of people have been wounded.

The nature and development of this conflict, which started in one of the most sensitive tension zones of the world, indicates that the loss of life, suffering and destruction will wildly increase. In addition to the deaths, injuries and maiming, Gaza, a blockaded enclave of some 2.3 million people, has now become an open-target death camp, with Israel cutting off even vital basic services such as electricity and running water. The following statement by the Israeli army spokesperson shows how the massacres of civilians will be justified: “Let me be very clear, Israel will respond to war crimes with decisive and painful force. Israeli intelligence has discovered Hamas hiding in homes, schools, hospitals and mosques in Gaza. The coming days will be very difficult.”

The Israeli Defence Minister, who said that the inhabitants of Gaza are “human animals”, has thus publicly announced that they will not recognise any measure such as “human” rights. And as a result of this, an explicit collective punishment has begun. For some time now, the fascist coalition government headed by Netanyahu, which has been talking about “ending the Palestinian problem for good”, has been driving the besieged Palestinian people to extinction with a succession of bloody attacks, the unlimited increase of Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Jerusalem, etc. And now, Israel declares “total war” on the very first day, saying that the attack coming from Gaza was their own “11 September”.

The global imperialist powers, the regional powers, other capitalist powers and structures are distorting and presenting this new flare-up of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict in terms of their own interests, within their own one-sidedness. We, on the other hand, do not approach the issue from the point of view of the interests of this or that imperialist power, this or that bourgeois power, nor do we look at them from religious, sectarian, national perspectives. We approach the issue with a revolutionary class perspective that transcends all these. The revolutionary working class has stood against the step-by-step usurpation of the homeland of the oppressed Palestinian people and their gradual dispossession, and has stood by the just national liberation cause of the Palestinian people from the very beginning. The real responsible for the bloodshed that has been going on in the Middle East for years are the imperialist powers scrambling for hegemony in the region, especially the USA, which unreservedly supports the Israeli state. It is clear that the policies pursued by the imperialist powers such as the USA, the EU, Russia and China and the regional powers drag the peoples of the region into the hell of war.

Imperialist carve-up and calculations

It should not be forgotten that the current world situation is conditioned by an imperialist war of division. The polarisation among imperialist powers and the war directly or indirectly affects developments all over the world. Especially when the Middle East, one of the hottest areas of this war, is considered, it is not possible to grasp the latest developments in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict independently of this imperialist war. There is no doubt that the calculations and conflicts of the regional powers and imperialist powers over the Middle East play a decisive role in the recent developments. Although the issue has many aspects and connections, the most clear and direct connection is that the ground has started to shift against Iran in the region recently.

Iran, which plays a key role in the Syrian leg of the Third World War, is a regional power that is positioned in the China-Russia imperialist camp and tries to overcome its plight in this way. Although Iran has achieved a certain influence on the Iraq-Syria-Lebanon belt, the relations of its main and greatest enemy in the region, i.e. Israel, with the Arab states and Turkey have always been a matter of great concern for it. It has never wanted Israel to find mainstays and breathing spaces through such channels and tried to prevent it. In the recent period, important processes have started to work against Iran in this context. On the one hand, Turkey has attempted to mend its broken relations with Israel, and on the other hand, Israel has entered into a serious “alliance” with Azerbaijan, including military dimensions. This alliance, with the co-operation of Turkey, contributed to Azerbaijan's victory in the Azerbaijan-Armenia war. Iran, on the other hand, has sided with Armenia in this war and in general. Therefore, Iran has lost positions in the north both in the context of Turkey and in the Caucasus region, while Israel has made gains.

But perhaps more important developments are taking place on the front of the Arab states in the Middle East. With the Abraham Accords between Israel and the UAE, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan, Arab states have entered into an increasingly closer relationship with Israel. Even Saudi Arabia, which has not recognised Israel as a state, has indirectly joined the framework of these agreements, opened its airspace to Israeli flights and, among other rapprochements, finally joined with it in the India-Europe economic corridor (“Spice Route”) announced at the G20 summit.

In short, all this means that Israel is strengthening its position in the region, while Iran is losing ground. A striking anecdote in this regard is Iran's statement on the concept of “normalisation” used by Israeli and Saudi officials at various stages in their messages about the rapprochement process going well: “Those who bet on 'normalisation' in the region will lose.” And now there is no doubt that the new war launched from Gaza has put this “normalisation” process under considerable strain. With this new war process, it is clear that any Arab state will avoid making agreements with Israel and appearing to mend fences. Even the Mahmoud Abbas administration, which is secretly involved in this whole selling-out, had to announce its support for the Al-Aqsa Flood operation, even though it strongly dislikes Hamas.

Therefore, it is clear that Iran, through Hamas, with which it has close ties, wants to undermine this whole course of events. There is no doubt that Iran is closely involved in the preparation and planning of the war. It would not be out of place to think that China and Russia played a role in the background. It is meaningful enough that China and Russia immediately vetoed the US attempt to pass a resolution condemning Hamas in the UN Security Council. On the other hand, Russia's statement that the policies pursued by the United States are responsible for the whole process is also revealing. Both Russia and China only called for an end to the armed conflict and for the realisation of a two-state solution based on the 1967 borders within the framework of UN resolutions, and thus did not give Israel the support it expected.

Israel and Palestine

Israel is trying to turn the attack coming from Palestine into a “favour of God” by taking on the role of the victim. As it is known, after the last elections in Israel, the most right-wing and reactionary government in the history of the country, consisting of racist/fascist elements, was formed. This fascist government is trying to move towards a more authoritarian regime with an initiative that has long provoked the outrage of diverse sections of society and has been the subject of numerous protests. It wants to weaken the powers of the Supreme Court so that the government's actions are no longer subject to judicial review and arbitrary state repression is legitimised and impunity is granted. This move has long been a source of great internal tension. Objections have been raised even from sensitive parts of the state apparatus, society has reacted with demonstrations, and even reserve soldiers have refused to serve in the army. In short, there has been internal turmoil in Israel for a long time. Now this fascist government has seized the opportunity to paralyse a significant part of the opposition under the pretext of “uniting in the face of attacks”. Although statements from the Communist Party of Israel and the Democratic Front for Peace and Equality (Hadash), a coalition of left-wing parties,[*] have declared the Netanyahu government to be primarily responsible for the policy that led to these attacks, Netanyahu has strengthened his hand by agreeing with the opposition National Union Party to form a “government of emergency” and a five-person “war cabinet”.

As for the Palestinian side, as we have pointed out in many of our articles, there is much to be said about the bourgeois leaderships there too. The most important of these is that these leaderships act on the basis of the interests of the ruling classes of Palestine, not the interests of millions of Palestinian labourers. In fact, the Palestinian territories, which Israel has reduced to a patch of land with a lot of holes in it, are divided on the basis of the conflicts of interests of the bourgeois leaderships. For a long time Fatah has parcelled out the West Bank and Hamas has parcelled out and dominated Gaza. Moreover, both organisations have long since degenerated and have become interest circles fully intertwined with global and regional powers. Although Fatah's fall into a compromising position selling out the Palestinian cause strengthened the hand of Hamas, which appears more radical and uncompromising, its fate was soon sealed. Hamas, which is part of the Ikhwan tradition, was founded to undermine the leftist line that the Palestinian national liberation movement was advancing and played this role skilfully. Moreover, by poisoning the Palestinian labourers with its reactionary, sharia ideology, it has tried to turn them against the Israeli labourers. It is also clear that Hamas' actions against civilians in some cases, which do not conform to the laws of war and human dignity, are not acceptable. This situation is most favourable to the Israeli rulers and they make full use of it.

It is not possible for the bourgeois leaderships, from Fatah to Hamas, from left to right, to respond to the expectations of the Palestinian people. The Palestinian problem can be solved neither by the diplomacy of Fatah and the bourgeois government generally called the Palestinian Authority, nor by the missiles fired by Hamas or organisations like Islamic Jihad. On the contrary, the policies and methods used by these reactionary leaderships harm the Palestinian people. While the world working class stands with the oppressed Palestinian people, it must take a position against the regional and global bourgeois powers and their local extensions that seek to establish influence in the region.

The current conditions of imperialist war have linked the fate of the Palestinian people and the working classes of the Middle East more than ever before. This makes it necessary for the labourers of the region to wage a common struggle against capitalism. It is impossible to move forward without the participation of the Palestinian people as well as the Israeli workers and labourers in this struggle. Peace and freedom, which are the greatest aspirations of both peoples and the peoples of the whole region, can only be possible through such a struggle.