After the new escalation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the ritual
invocation of the "self-determination of the Palestinian people" and"two peoples, two states" has returned to the left. But are we really
sure that this is the key to resolving the conflict? ---- The new
explosion of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict after the massacre of
October 7, 2023 is part of an international framework marked by the
ignition of multiple fronts in the clash between Western imperialisms
and their Eastern antagonists. A game of risk that sees the USA and
Europe as protagonists on one side, China and Russia on the other, and
in the middle a handful of regional powers - Turkey, Iran, Saudi Arabia
and other Gulf monarchies, to name a few - whose moves reflect their own
rather than the strategic interests of the alliances to which they
belong. Analysts have spoken extensively about the potential or declared
links between the Hamas attack and those fronts, identifying different
and largely complementary aspects: the sabotage of the Israeli-Saudi
policy of détente under the aegis of the US; an operation by the Iranian
regime to hide its internal crisis; the effect of the typical tendency
of regional powers to exploit moments of "distraction" of the great
powers to settle their own scores. All plausible interpretations, but
which must deal with just as many contradictions. Among these is the
support that Israel receives from some BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia,
India, China and South Africa) officially very critical of it. After
Colombia joined the BDS (Boycott Divestment Sanctions) campaign by
canceling coal exports to Israel, for example, Russia and South Africa
(which has reported Netanyahu for genocide to the International Criminal
Court) remain the second and third suppliers and some agencies write
that the Russian share could rise. While Lula's Brazil, which withdrew
its ambassador to Tel Aviv in condemnation of the carnage in Gaza, has
supplied 9% of Israeli oil imports in the last year, presumably also
used by the IDF (Israel Defense Forces) for its military operations.
Brazil and South Africa have also recently clarified that they do not
intend to apply "unilateral sanctions" to Israel.
National question or class question?
The point that interests us, however, is another. The war has reopened
the political debate and the demonstrations of almost unanimous support
by Western countries for the "only democracy in the Middle East"
(although with some cracks after the recent Israeli attacks on UNIFIL,
the UN interposition force in Lebanon) do not correspond on the left to
a position capable of going beyond the ritual repetition of the slogan
on the right to self-determination of the Palestinian people. Obviously,
this is not to deny that there is a Palestinian national question, but
to ask whether addressing the problem in this way is useful to provide a
viable exit strategy for the Palestinians and a fertile political
perspective for those who support their struggle. The Palestinians have
every right to demand an end to the military occupation against them -
which is the main cause of every conflict and for which the main
responsibility lies with Israeli governments (in Israel even the
progressives of Haaretz write this) - and to fight with weapons to free
themselves. The Israeli carnage in Gaza is an act of blind and
unjustifiable cruelty against them. That said, however, that the
solution is to address the issue in terms of a struggle for national
liberation, perhaps evoking the slogan of "two peoples, two states", is
far from obvious. A left that sides with the workers in every political
and military conflict should grasp, first of all, the conflict between
the dominant classes and the oppressed classes. The Israeli-Palestinian
conflict should not escape this golden rule. On the left, however, the
issue of social oppression in the Middle East has been set aside and
supplanted by that of national oppression for decades now. In doing so,
first the myth of the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization) was
endorsed, portrayed as an expression of progressive bourgeois
nationalism capable of ferrying the entire Palestinian society towards a
horizon of freedom and democracy. Then, when that myth crumbled
miserably, the left was divided between those who regret Arafat and
those who instead clear Hamas as the only possible barrier to Israel's
politics. After all, there are those who make the same argument with
Iranian mullahs, African putschists and Eastern satrapies, hiding behind
the "they are objectively anti-imperialists". The reality is that Abu
Mazen's PNA (Palestinian National Authority) and the Islamic leadership
of Gaza are expressions of different sectors of the Palestinian
bourgeoisie: on the one hand, financiers and businessmen with interests
in the major Arab capitals and global financial markets, on the other, a
petty bourgeoisie more tied to the territories where the Palestinian
people live. Their differences do not reflect a different degree of
devotion to the cause, but only the different impact of Israeli politics
on their business. In any case, both factions have never hesitated to
use their people as a maneuvering mass to advance their own interests,
sometimes by striking Israel, sometimes by negotiating with its
leadership. Nothing to do, both for their nature and for the different
historical phase, with the bourgeois nationalism of the Arab countries
of the 1960s and 1970s.
The same dialectic of clash-negotiation between Palestinian and Israeli
leaders, beneath the crust of rhetoric, is regulated by material
interests that at times can even push them to lay down their weapons and
take up the cash register. The most sensational example was the joint
management of gambling houses. The Torah and the Koran prohibit
gambling. Therefore, until the second Intifada (2000-2005), when the Tel
Aviv security forces banned them from entering the West Bank, many
Israelis went to the Oasis Casino in Jericho, run by Al Fatah members in
partnership with Israeli businessmen, to circumvent the ban. Thus, in
the days when young Palestinians clashed in the streets with Israeli
soldiers, Palestinian and Israeli managers met to examine with concern
the future of their businesses: two million dollars a day. A scene that
probably repeated itself a year ago, given that at the time of the
attack on October 7, the PA and Israeli authorities were discussing the
reopening of the casino. But if Hamas points to that incident as proof
of the corruption that reigns in the PA, in reality it reflects the
class issue more than a "moral issue". For its part, Hamas was born in
the 1980s, like Hezbollah in Lebanon, thanks to the support of Israel's
leaders, who at the time saw Islamic organizations as a means to divide
the opposing front and weaken the secular Palestinian currents that were
more closely linked to the USSR. A strategy that with the end of the
Cold War, the crisis of the PLO and the rise of Hamas in the mid-2000s
changed in form - Israel no longer directly supports the Islamist
leadership - but not in substance. For Israel's ruling classes, in fact,
Hamas is the best possible enemy, the best alibi to keep the country in
a permanent state of war and justify even brutal crimes in the eyes of
the international community. Today, Netanyahu's shaky clique, which
until October 7 clashed with the judiciary, with the streets and the
open hostility even of some military circles, has managed to secure the
support of the opposition. In short, war, for those who are part of it,
is at least for now a (political) life insurance.
The internationalist alternative
From this point of view, the attack of October 7, 2023 was criminal not
only and so much for humanitarian reasons, but because it hit a
potential ally, the only one truly decisive for the oppressed
Palestinians: not the Arab countries, not the "Western democracies", nor
the United Nations (now more manifestly impotent than ever), but the
Israeli and Arab-Israeli proletarians who live on the other side of the
barbed wire, oppressed, certainly to a lesser extent, but by the same
oppressors and therefore also interested in getting rid of them. The
idea that the centrality of class conflict applies to all peoples except
the Israelis is the denial of one of the cornerstones of Marx's thought,
namely that a materially dominated class is also ideologically
dominated. To free the Israeli proletarians from the consequences of
that domination, which pushes them to see the Palestinian proletarians
and not the Zionist bourgeoisie as their enemy, it is necessary to break
it, not take refuge in the illusory prospect that one can win by moving
onto the terrain of the "Palestinian struggle against the Israelis".
The tug-of-war over Netanyahu's justice reform, while involving large
segments of the population and the Histadrut trade union itself, was in
fact a power struggle between the various factions of the Israeli
bourgeoisie for control over a state founded on the fragile balance
between its different souls. However, it also somehow revealed social
intolerance towards a regime that keeps a fifth of the population below
the poverty line, fuels ethnic and economic discrimination (the salary
of an Arab-Israeli is 58% of that of a Jewish-Israeli) and that in
recent years has made salaried workers pay the cost of every crisis
first and foremost, including many Asian immigrants like those held
hostage by Hamas a year ago. Given that there are no easy solutions, it
seems to us that looking at the internal contradictions of Israeli
society and aiming for unity between the real victims of the conflict,
on both sides of the barbed wire, is a more plausible hypothesis than
relying on the initiatives of a reactionary or corrupt Palestinian
ruling class, largely dependent on countries accustomed to cynically
using the Palestinians according to their own convenience. More
plausible even than the illusion of being able to create an autonomous
state in a world in which, unlike 40 years ago, any prospect of
independent development of a country in the interstices, now eliminated,
between the spheres of influence of imperialisms is now pure utopia.
This applies to Ukraine, despite having huge economic resources, a
relatively modern industry and army, a very respectable history and
nevertheless torn apart by a war in which it can only decide which
imperialism to submit to. Imagine for an "independent Palestine" but
poor, without resources, today razed to the ground, and located on the
border of a rich and heavily armed State of Israel. A State of Israel
dominated by the cliques that today support the massacre of the
population of Gaza and the occupation of the West Bank, tolerated by an
international community for which the Palestinians are a tiny pawn on a
global chessboard where much larger interests are at stake. A chessboard
where one can even think of outsourcing to Netanyahu the dirty work that
the democratic West cannot afford to do with its own hands.
Marco Veruggio, journalist, activist and researcher, writes about
economics and international politics for Italian and foreign newspapers.
He is editor of the website and newsletter PuntoCritico.info.
http://alternativalibertaria.fdca.it/wpAL/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Il-Cantiere-30-novembre-2024.pdf
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