FOR PALESTINIAN LIBERATION BY PERMANENT REVOLUTION
The Hamas led uprising was not an unprovoked act of terror but a response to ongoing Israeli terrorism. Near daily killings of Palestinians by settlers and the IDF escalated this last month into religio-fanatical Zionist attacks on worshipers at the Al Asqa mosque. Since the Deir Yassin massacre and the King David hotel bombing the Zionists’ project has been militarily directed terror against civilians. It has always been a land grab by force of arms. To date every acquiescence, negotiated or under duress, has brought further encroachment.
Occupying Palestinian’s homes and farms, denying citizenship, and personhood, continues today with unending displacement backed by the full weight of the US Navy. Resistance to the combined weight of the U.S. military and the U.S. funded IDF may appear futile, but it is not even a choice, it is a matter of survival.
The coincidence of the colonial settler project with the geo-strategic interests of the US is as undeniable as is the culpability for the decades long war on the Palestinians. The tail does not wag the dog! Zionism made its deal with Western imperialism in 1948 to be the militarized fortress against the Arab revolution in MENA, today an installment on that bill comes due; and Jewish and Arab workers pay the blood price!
This unresolved hotspot of the international class conflict has long been the U.S. directed Zionist outpost in MENA blocking the completion of the Arab national democratic revolution. Because the upsurge of the national democratic revolution in 2011 did not become the permanent socialist revolution to end imperialist control of the region, MENA is now in a tug of war between the declining hegemon the US/EU led imperialist bloc vs the rising arbiter of international relations the China/Russia imperialist bloc. On the ground suffering the consequences have been the dispossessed Palestinian people whose right to resist occupation is undeniable in any context except the world view of the oppressor states.
The 2016 UN security council resolution 2334 identified Israel’s settlement activity as a “flagrant violation” of international law.
Not even the Washington Post hit job on this map can hide the theft of Palestinians land. No matter how the Zionist settler population portray themselves as victims, on the ground the walled off territories do not lie! Today there is no independent Palestine, the indigenous people are denied citizenship rights, and live as refugees at the largess of the occupier, corralled into ghettoized districts in perpetuity as mainstream Zionism debates the final solution.
The Washington Post fails to disprove this map!
Zionists justify their right to colonize with the propagandistic slogan every Jewish child has been taught for 100 years claiming Palestine, “…is a land without people for a people without land.” The Zionist assertion that Palestinians as a people, “do not exist” is a generally accepted fact in the United States, despite pro-Zionist historian Benny Morris’s citation that the Muslim population of Palestine was 10x the Jewish population in 1914. The persistent justification of the Nakba by the Nazi Holocaust unites the imperialist Democrats with the Ultra MAGA Republicans today in a war they can both get behind. Never mind that the Christian Nationalist’s leading MAGA are confirmed Jew haters whose commitment to Zion is based on the fanciful dreams of a second-coming and a Jew exclusive rapture when Jerusalem is returned to the Jewish people (thus Trump is the savior’s assistant).
There has been no backing down from expanding the illegal settlements, as reported by AP settler violence displaced 1,100 Palestinians since 2022. The fact that Israel can shut off water, food and power and extract collective punishment against an occupied population demonstrates beyond reasonable doubt who is the oppressor and who is the oppressed. For 75 years the Palestinians, generation after generation, have lived a refugee existence, ghettoized and denied self-determination. The international working class must stand with the oppressed against their oppressor.
In the war between the oppressor Israel, the semi-colonial military outpost of the US in MENA revolutionary workers stand with the oppressed Palestinians. To win, the working class needs its own politically independent mass workers party to lead the national liberation struggle in going over to become the socialist revolution. Only a revolutionary working class party and international can lead the oppressed masses past the pitfalls, roadblocks and divisions of sectarianism, chauvinism, racism and patriarchy. Today these forces, meager, isolated and disorganized as they are, find themselves in struggle alongside the Hamas militants. While the entire political project of the working class is counterposed to the program of Hamas, Hezbollah and the PLO, the US military backed onslaught by the IDF at this moment requires revolutionary workers to make a military bloc with Hamas fighters. And while we fight the U.S. military and IDF on every front, we also conduct a political struggle to expose the tactical blunders, misguided strategic goals and ideologies of the nationalist leaders in order to win the working masses to build their vanguard party. The revolutionary workers participating in the armed uprising do not countenance rape and murder of innocents. Terrorism, worse than being morally repugnant and criminal, is counterproductive, it alienates hard won allies, pushes victory further into the future as the IDF reigns hell and fury in deadly bombardments. Anti-Zionists will support the war of national liberation against the IDF but do not tolerate Jew hating violence.
The IDF has long since ensured that even tactical non-violence is impossible. The U.S. corporate media erases history when the IDF kills American citizens. How and why Rachel Corrie was killed and how journalist Shireen Abu Akleh’s murder is demonstrative of how the IDF treats non-violent resistance and reporting eradicates the arguments of the Gandhian whiners who blame victims for not turning the other cheek.
The failure of the nationalist leaders to complete the national democratic revolution is no accident. In the semi-colonies and colonies all the democratic tasks are now tied to the socialist revolution because the national bourgeoisies are creatures of a world dominated by imperialist power on which they are ultimately dependent. The long term failure by the nationalist leaders to stop the Zionist encroachment sows frustration among the masses and the youth. Only the workers revolution can defeat imperialism and that is not on the nationalists’ agenda.
Hamas has no path to victory yet needs to dissipate the frustration of the masses who want their war of national liberation. To win this war the crisis of leadership must be resolved in the struggle for the proletarian party. To win the national democratic revolution the workers need to take control of the war and run it with the working classes’ methods. These include strikes, occupations and struggles over surplus value, over which class controls production and which class takes state power into its own hands to fulfill its own program.
Palestinian self-determination can only be won by the working class taking the leadership of the national liberation struggle and turning it into a fight for socialist revolution. Hamas, like the capitalist nationalist leadership of the Irish Republican Army of the 20th c, has every right to conduct the war of national liberation as it sees fit; but just as the limited nationalist program of the IRA failed to defeat British Imperialism, Hamas’s class political program is a capitalist theocratic anachronism which dooms those who place faith in their leadership to failure.
FOR THE ALL PALESTINE GENERAL STRIKE!
USA HANDS OFF PALESTINE!
IDF OUT OF GAZA AND OCCUPIED TERRITORIES!
FOR INTERNATIONAL WORKER ACTION TO STRIKE ISRAELI SHIPPING AT THE PORTS!
TO WIN NATIONAL INDEPENDENCE IMPERIALIST AND NATIONAL CAPITALS MUST BE EXPROPRIATED BY THE WORKING CLASS FOR ITS USE UNDER ITS PLAN!
FOR A SOCIALIST FEDERATION ACROSS MENA!
BUILD THE REVOLUTIONARY WORKERS INTERNATIONAL!
International Leninist Trotskyist Tendency (ILTT) October 10 2023 (revised 10/15/2023)
