Gaza: a massacred population desperately shuttling between the south and the north in an attempt to “rebuild their lives” where neither Tel Aviv nor Washington allow them to do so

On January 19, 468 days after October 7, 2023, a fateful “ceasefire” went into effect in Gaza, made possible – so say reports in the mainstream international media – by the ascension of Donald Trump to the White House throne.

The 7 October armed incursion by Hamas-led militias resulted in more than 1 200 deaths and the capture of 250 hostages serving as bargaining chips. The “reasons” for the Palestinian attacks and raids on Israelis and the massacres perpetrated by Israel against the Palestinians have their roots in the old and unresolved  Palestinian “national question” on the Palestinian side; and in the objectives of the imperialist powers victorious in the Second World War to build up a firmly anchored outpost of the West in the Near and Middle East: it was necessary to stifle all desires for independence in a region that was too rich in oil, which during the war was too close to the Nazi-fascist Axis and which was too resistant to submitting to the economic and social dictates of a capitalism hungry for raw materials, economic territories, colonies.

The British, French, and American imperialists, in their efforts to subjugate the Arab and Muslim populations, did not limit themselves to capital investment, military occupation, and the recruitment into their service – under the promise of protection, capital, and privileged political relations – of any tribe or people that was in conflict with others: they pulled a card in the Middle Eastern arena that proved far more loyal and useful than any local tribe or people: Zionism.

What could be better than a people like the Jews, who could claim their historical origins in Palestine, bonded by their religion and fiercely yearning, after centuries of persecution and pogroms, for an internationally recognized land in which they could finally settle? A people towards which the imperialist powers that won the Second World War had every interest in showing condescension and posthumous protection in the face of the extermination to which it had been subjected by the Nazi-Fascists and that they never stopped, even though they knew exactly what was going on in the concentration camps. In 1948, after a tumultuous period in which the masses of Jews moving from European countries to Palestine searching for a place to settle, clashed with the Palestinians who had always lived there, the State of Israel was born, recognised by the League of Nations (later the United Nations). Since then, the illusory division of Palestine into two states, one Jewish and one Arab, has been constantly talked about, but the State of Palestine will never see the light of day. The birth of the State of Israel will not stop the war between the Jews and the Palestinians, who will be deceived for decades by the Arab countries that they could force Israel to accept the existence of the State of Palestine. In fact, for decades Israel will always win wars against the Arab countries (Egypt, Syria, Lebanon); it will expand its borders to the West Bank, Gaza and the Golan Heights, thanks to the ongoing political, financial and military support of the countries of Western Europe and, above all, the United States, whose armed flank it has become in the Muslim Middle East.

It is nothing new that Israeli governments have always sought to make the whole of Palestine the Jewish homeland, subjugating the Arab population after reducing it to a few hundred thousand. The fairy story of “two peoples, two states”, propagated by the imperialist powers, served and still serves only to keep alive the illusion of a democratic solution. For eighty years the blood of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian proletarians has been spilled because of this illusion; and it is still being spilled in the name of a state that will never see the light of day, neither by the actions of the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) in the West Bank, nor by Hamas or the movement that will replace it in Gaza.

The time of bourgeois revolutions, when peoples of a territory with the same language and customs imposed the constitution of independent states through their armed insurrection against the colonial powers, has passed. The history of capitalism had reached a stage, the imperialist stage, which could only be opposed by proletarian and communist revolution. It was the case with the October Revolution of 1917; but in the following decade it did not spread to Europe, let alone to America, thus preventing the revolution from becoming truly international . After the defeats of the revolutionary attempts in Germany, Hungary, the counter-revolution ruined the attempt in China and buried Bolshevik October, leading the bourgeois world to the second world imperialist slaughter.

The post-World War II period undoubtedly saw the rise of anti-colonial struggles that took advantage of the critical situation of capitalism caused by the war itself, but these struggles were not successful everywhere, and certainly not in Palestine.

The very birth of Israel was not the result of a classical bourgeois revolution, but of a “revolution” imposed from above by the imperialist powers, this time through a purposefully imported population. Its aim was not only to wedge itself into enemy territory, but also to subjugate the Palestinian people by making them totally dependent on Israeli national interests and by subjecting them to a large proletarianisation. They will thus become proletarian not only in terms of economic conditions, i.e. as a people without reserves, possessing only their own labour force, but moreover in terms of having no country, a negative fact from the bourgeois ideological point of view, but a highly positive historical fact from the proletarian and communist point of view.

The war that Israel has unleashed in Gaza, and which it will unleash in the West Bank at varying timings and with varying degrees of violence, is aimed not only at crushing the Hamas militias in response to the massacre of 7 October, but also at placing the population of Gaza today and of the West Bank tomorrow in a state of perpetual displacement. This is where the objectives of Israel and the United States intersect, objectives that Netanyahu has never made a secret of, Biden has hidden, while Trump has flaunted them with his usual pomp: to force the Palestinians to leave for Jordan or Egypt and make Gaza, with its beautiful beaches, a tourist destination for the world's rich, and the West Bank one of the regions that Israel already calls Judea and Samaria.

One of the problems of Israeli Jews has always been demographic: their goal was and is to form an overwhelming majority against the Arab-Israeli population, with its numerical limit of no more than one-fifth of the total population. The most recent estimate of Israel's total population (2024) is 9,880,000, of which 1.9 million are Israeli Arabs, thus complying with this ratio. As for the Palestinians, the latest figures (2023) indicate 2.2 million in Gaza, a little less than 4 million in the West Bank, with the addition of some 4 million refugees in Jordan, most of whom seek to return to Palestine and thus pose a continuing problem for Israel. Apart from Israel, it is Trump who envisages the future of the Palestinians as a forced migration to neighbour Arab countries.

The peace that Trump and Netanyahu envision, apart from peace for the dead, is peace for a population deported from its homeland and enslaved to the capitalist interests of Israel and any other country that will consent to take charge of dealing with Palestinian migrants within its own state, perhaps in exchange for being paid a few billion dollars, as Chancellor Merkel's Germany did with Turkey in the case of Middle Eastern refugees.

The current truce of bombings in Gaza – but the guns are not falling silent in the West Bank, where the PNA has sided with the Israeli army in the hunt for Palestinian “terrorists”, as if perhaps Israeli soldiers and PNA policemen were not state terrorists – has set in motion hundreds of thousands of Palestinians displaced in the south to return to the north, where they used to live and where they will find in ninety percent rubble instead of homes. But their attachment to their land and their pride in not bowing completely to blind Israeli violence is so strong that they say they will rebuild what has been destroyed by the war rather than go abroad because once they leave Gaza they may never be able to return. For the Israeli bourgeoisie, of course, the tenacity with which the Palestinians are fighting to remain in their land is not an insignificant obstacle. But for the Gazan bourgeoisie, whose interests are divided between Hamas, the PNA and other movements in the pay of Middle Eastern countries opposed to Israel, the Palestinians' attachment to their land is a lever that can be used to make the proletarians identify themselves with the interests of the bourgeois, whether they are sold out to the imperialist powers and the Israeli bourgeoisie, or are in opposition to them, having lent themselves to other powers such as Iran.

One way or another, Palestinian proletarians will never escape the increasingly dramatic spiral of inter-bourgeois and inter-imperialist conflicts that tend to escalate in the Middle East region. The history of inter-state conflict and class struggle objectively pushes them to a crossroads: either to embrace the interests of their own national bourgeoisie and function as cannon fodder not only for the Israeli bourgeoisie but also for the rival Palestinian bourgeois factions; or to embrace the cause of their own class and struggle to organise independently of any bourgeois interests, internal or external, and to seek solidarity not from the Arab bourgeoisies, Islamic or otherwise, self-proclaimed friends or temporary enemies of Israel, but from the proletarians with whom they share language, customs, conditions of exploitation and immediate class interests.

Today, this path seems very distant or downright impossible, not only for the Palestinian proletarians, but for the proletarians of the entire Middle East region. In fact, it also seems an impracticable path for the proletarians of Europe, America, Russia, China and any other country in the world, as catastrophic was the failure of the class cause of the international proletariat due to the counter-revolution, the pernicious consequences of which we have been suffering for almost a century. But capitalism, although it develops to the maximum its oppressive, brutal and suffocating character, although it proclaims with great confidence its supposed invincibility, does not cease to create ever deeper and ever greater factors of crisis: sooner or later they will form the basis for a positive, class reaction of the proletariat, no matter from which country the social storm begins.

January 27, 2025

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