The Goal of the Palestinian Proletariat Is Not an Impossible “Palestinian Homeland,” But the Class Struggle That Unites Proletarians Above National Divisions

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That the Palestinian people are destined never to be able to settle in their land of origin in a peaceful way and recognized by all other states has been evident for decades. Since 1948, with the establishment of the State of Israel – but not of the State of Palestine – this destiny has been among the most probable. Palestinians have become, for the most part against their will, proletarians, progressively expropriated of their homes, their fields, their “homeland.” From the point of view of bourgeois ideology, this is a tragedy that could only be resolved by recognizing for the Palestinians a piece of land where they could live and establish their own independent state. But eighty years after the end of the Second Imperialist World War – in which the great democratic powers never considered the Palestinian people worthy of having their own state, their own “homeland,” their own bourgeois ruling class like almost all other countries; in which they deceived them with the United Nations declarations and the refrain “two peoples, two states,” draining their energies in wars where Palestinian fighters were deluded also by “friendly” Arab countries, soon shown to be as much enemies as, if not worse than, the Zionists; after eighty years of illusions and fighting – the Palestinians find themselves stripped of everything and deprived of life itself. With the worldwide complicity of all states, starting with the most democratic and the greatest butcher of peoples, the USA, the Zionist bourgeois-democratic state of Israel is carrying out its great dream: to lay waste around the Palestinians, seize their land, enslave those who escaped the bombings, and guarantee social, economic, and political privileges to the Israeli population according to the classic criteria of racist and religious discrimination.

The fact that the Palestinian people are a people without a homeland, and that their majority is made up of proletarians, could, however, from the proletarian and historical point of view, be a positive fact. The proletariat is, by definition, the class without a homeland, even when the bourgeoisie feeds it the refrain of a common homeland: it owns no means of production, no capital, and above all it does not own the product of its labor, because the wealth it produces belongs exclusively to the dominant bourgeois class, to the capitalists who defend this reality with the state and its armed forces. Palestinian proletarians – that is, the majority of the Palestinian population – even if they manage to cultivate something on a tiny plot of land, depend entirely on work for Israeli bosses or on the “aid” that various imperialist powers grant them to save the humanitarian face they flaunt in order to cover the systematic massacres in Gaza and the West Bank. Nothing better can Palestinians expect from political and military organizations such as the Palestinian Authority or Hamas, just as before from the groups that formed the PLO, because these organizations sold themselves from the outset to stronger bourgeoisies with interests completely opposed to those of the Palestinian proletariat, which is used, now by one, now by another bourgeoisie, for the sole purpose of gaining for themselves some privileges and a minimum of power over it, to bend it forever to capitalist exploitation, extinguishing its class instinct to rebel against all oppression, all abuse.

That recently, even in the devastated situation of Gaza, there have been demonstrations against Hamas demanding it free the Israeli hostages still in its hands – hoping this might stop the bombings and destruction by Tel Aviv – certainly shows a fracture in the relative trust Hamas had gained in the previous fifteen years, a fracture determined more by desperation than by conscious political opposition. But in the midst of a war in which the Gazan population finds no refuge anywhere, and is forced by Israel to move continually from north to south and vice versa, because it is struck, bombed, killed, starved wherever it is, the end of a Palestinian Gaza and a Palestinian West Bank draws near.

The immediate and near-future way out of this real programmed extermination is unfortunately not favorable to the Palestinians. Either they are massacred, or they allow themselves to be deported to some country that agrees with the USA and Israel to take them in, as happens with any industrial waste. For Israel and its greatest protector, the United States of America – regardless of whether “Democrats” or “Republicans” sit in the White House – historic Palestine, though reduced and fragmented, drawn in old maps for lovers of ancient history, will sooner or later have to change its name; the Zionists coined it more than a century ago: Greater Israel. History has always been written by the victors of wars, who have changed the names of countries, mountains, rivers, seas, and cities, formally decreeing the modification or cancellation of the past. Indigenous populations subjected to victors’ rule also suffered the tearing apart of their identities, traditions, and ancient past.

The recent episode concerning the new name Trump wants to give to the Gulf of Mexico is indicative. The Gulf of Mexico, whose name derives from the decision of European navigators and colonizers who “discovered” the New World (named America in honor of Amerigo Vespucci), should, according to Trump’s will, take the name of Gulf of America – in honor of the Trumpian “new golden age for the United States” – as Trump officially renamed it on January 25. An officiality valid for now only in the USA; it remains to be seen how long it will take before the two international bodies responsible for naming the planet’s water masses approve this change, making it official under international law. But beyond legal and official questions, it remains an imperialistic act by the USA with which Trump intends to change history and identity, in this case of a Gulf that since 1540 has been called the Gulf of Mexico, previously known as the “Gulf of New Spain.” The Mexican government naturally disagrees, not only because it has borne its name for almost five centuries, but also because most of the waters of the gulf – 829,000 km² – correspond to Mexico’s exclusive economic zone, while the remaining 662,000 km² correspond to that of the USA.

Between the United States and Mexico there is no war, except at the commercial level, unlike the war between Israel and Hamas and the entire Palestinian people. But another issue puts the USA at odds with Mexico: clandestine immigration, not only of Mexicans, but of people fleeing every Latin American country for reasons of economic, political, and social survival, who, crossing Mexico, try to enter the United States. Thus Trump can continue to call the Gulf of Mexico by its new name, Gulf of America, knowing that this holds only for the White House, and knowing that what matters most to him is bending Mexico to the interests of the U.S. economy. To achieve this objective – not satisfied by the agreements existing so far between the two countries – he has unleashed the pressure of tariffs against it. In reality, whether the Gulf continues to be called the Gulf of Mexico or is renamed the Gulf of America, little of fundamental importance will change between the USA and Mexico: U.S. corporations, especially in automotive and technology, will continue to exploit Mexican labor in plants located in Mexico, where labor costs are much lower than in the USA, while also benefiting from the advantage of shorter transport distances for goods compared to Southeast Asia or China.

In the case of Israel and the Palestinians, things are completely different. Here we do not have masses of proletarians and dispossessed people leaving their “own” country to build a new future in another, economically stronger and socially “less” repressive country. The Palestinians intended, and still intend, to continue living and developing in their own land, and in the 1920s and 1930s they revolted against a massive Jewish immigration promoted and supported by Britain, which held the imperialist Mandate to control, after World War I and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, a part of the Middle East including Palestine. But from the outset British imperialism obstructed the Palestinian self-determination movement and used Jewish immigration – whose historical roots in that land were nevertheless real – against it. For the Palestinians, little changed with the Second Imperialist World War and its end; indeed, with the establishment of the State of Israel, things grew steadily worse. Historical events have shown that the Palestinian bourgeoisie was not able to transform its struggle for self-determination into a genuine national revolution, although it did drag behind it poor peasants and Palestinian proletarians; but by relying for success in its national struggle on the support of the bourgeoisies of other Arab countries and on imperialist powers, it decreed its complete failure.

On the map of the territory once called Palestine, the borders between the State of Israel and the territories inhabited by Palestinians have been continuously modified as a result of the many wars Israel has fought against Arab states and the Palestinians, making it impossible to define a unified territory on which a Palestinian national revolution could have erected its own state. In recent decades, Israel has encouraged and protected its settlers in seizing pieces of land, especially in the West Bank, in order to systematically prevent the formation of a unified Palestinian territory. This has transformed the West Bank, also called the Occupied Territories, into a kind of Swiss cheese riddled with Israeli colonies. In recent days came the news of the revival by Netanyahu’s government of the old Israeli E1 project: the colonized corridor that will connect occupied Jerusalem to Ma’ale Adumim (for 50 years the largest fortified Israeli colony in the West Bank) and from there to the Jordan Valley. The project, supported by all Israeli governments over the past forty years, provides for the construction of 3,412 housing units for settlers. This corridor will be built entirely on Palestinian territory, from which the small Palestinian communities who live and farm there will be forcibly expelled. Thus Jerusalem will be completely isolated from the rest of the West Bank, which will be split in two by this corridor: Jenin and Nablus will remain to the north, Bethlehem and Hebron to the south. Bezalel Smotrich, Israeli finance minister and representative of the far-right nationalists, boasting of the support of Netanyahu and Trump, declared that this project “buries the idea of a Palestinian state.”

The European Union, which would have an interest in pacifying the entire area in order to maximize its business and trade with all the countries of the region, continues to wave the little flag of “two peoples, two states,” while knowing perfectly well that neither the EU nor the United States will impose on Israel the creation of a Palestinian state. Such an imposition, given total Israeli opposition, could only proceed through an act of military force; the EU and the United States are light years away from waging war on Israel. On the contrary, they are supporting it financially, diplomatically, politically, and commercially – and the profitable trade in arms and advanced military technologies proves this fully. The real objectives of these decades of massacres of Palestinians are: to erase the possibility of an independent future for the Palestinian population, to enslave it to the capitalist and imperialist interests that intersect in the Middle East, and to eliminate any chance that a radicalization of Palestinian groups, generated by the ongoing massacres and extermination, could find an organized outlet to resist – even through armed struggle – the tremendous oppression to which the Palestinians are subjected.

But the special military operation that Israel has carried out for the past 23 months against the population of Gaza is not limited to bombings and the continuous displacements of Palestinians from one zone of the Strip to another and back again. Added to this has been an ethnic cleansing through the systematic starvation of the already exhausted Palestinian masses, the herding of hundreds of people into the rare centers of the GHF (Gaza Humanitarian Foundation) where very little food is distributed and where Palestinians are targeted by gunfire from soldiers and mercenaries, the blocking of trucks carrying water, food, clothing, medicine, etc., and the destruction of every house, every shelter. Malnutrition has become the additional weapon not only to immediately wipe out Palestinian lives, but also to erase the possibility of life for future generations. Malnutrition, pushed beyond the levels of the Nazi concentration camps, has consequences not only on today’s mothers but also on their children and their children’s children.

The assault on the capital, Gaza City – where over one million Palestinians are concentrated – appears as the final stage of Israel’s occupation of the Strip. With Gaza City fallen and reduced to a heap of rubble, for the Palestinians falls also the last hope of imagining an end less horrific than the one they are currently living.

All this is not the responsibility of the Israeli bourgeois ruling class alone, but also of the bourgeois ruling class especially of the countries of Europe and America, while Russia, China, India, and their association called BRICS show no interest in a genocide witnessed by the whole world. When German Chancellor Merz declared some time ago that he thanked the Israelis for doing the dirty work Europeans could not afford to do, he only expressed the thought of all the world’s bourgeoisies: namely, to take advantage of the Israeli butchers who not only do everything to annihilate “Palestinian terrorism” – today identified with Hamas – but proceed with particularly cruel and brutal methods. Some European leaders, for the cameras, declared that massacring tens of thousands of civilians, mostly women and children, was “too much,” “unacceptable” – yet they continued to arm the Tel Aviv army to the teeth and to collaborate, through their universities and scientific institutions, with Israeli universities and institutions. The aim is to eradicate from Palestine the entire Palestinian population, guilty of continuously generating masses of “terrorists.”

And indeed, what better way to fight “Palestinian terrorism,” which rises from the ashes every decade under new names, than with a far superior terrorism – terrorism carried out by the Israeli state itself, supported and backed on every level by the most powerful terrorist imperialism in the world, American imperialism?

So far the bourgeois class – not only Israeli or American, but in every country – has shown and continues to show through facts that it defends its privileges, its power, its system of wage-labor exploitation, by all means, and increasingly by military and terrorist means. The bourgeoisie knows, from experience, that the greatest danger it can face is not a war between imperialist states, nor even a nuclear war, because even from such a war it would still manage to reap business and profits, caring nothing for how many hundreds of thousands or millions of human beings would be massacred. Super-democratic America did not think twice before sending its bombers with atomic weapons over Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, 1945 – just as super-democratic Britain did not think twice before dispatching, between February 13 and 15, 1945, its deadly bomber squadron to Dresden, razed to the ground with explosive and incendiary (phosphorus) bombs.

The hatred that one bourgeoisie can accumulate toward enemy bourgeoisies has no limits, but once the war is over, the respective bourgeoisies “make peace” and return to doing business together while waiting for the next crises that will lead them once again to war. The hatred that every bourgeois class, instead, harbors toward the proletariat – toward the masses from whose exploitation it extracts surplus value and thus profits – is historical, profound, and natural, a class hatred. This hatred rests on two decisive social factors: the first immediate, the second historical. The first lies in the fact that, to obtain greater profits from the capital invested, capitalists must exploit wage-labor power to the maximum, pushing fatigue and danger to the lives of workers to ever greater extremes – and this explains why the more wealth accumulates in the hands of capitalists, the more impoverished and worse the living conditions of the proletariat become. The second concerns class struggle, which, in specific historical situations, the proletariat has developed up to anti-bourgeois and thus anti-capitalist revolution. It has shown not only that political power can be used in favor of the needs of life and emancipation of the majority of the population in every country in the world, but that such political power – which we communists call the dictatorship of the proletariat – is the only one capable of transforming the capitalist economy, on which bourgeois society is based, into a socialist economy. This represents the historic leap of the whole society from division into antagonistic classes to a classless society, a species-society, in which the purpose of production is not capitalist profit but the satisfaction of the social needs of all human beings.

Indeed, the revolutions of 1848 in Europe, the Paris Commune of 1871 (the first concrete experience of the dictatorship of the proletariat), the Russian October Revolution of 1917, and the subsequent formation of the Communist International, to which all the world’s proletarians looked as the beacon of the world proletarian revolution, are the demonstration that the class struggle of the proletariat is historically directed toward revolutionizing the entire capitalist and bourgeois world. What would the bourgeois class lose from a victorious proletarian revolution? Political power, certainly – and with it the state that centralizes military force in defense of its class interests. Not only that: it would lose its existence as a ruling class, as the class that appropriates the entire social wealth produced by the labor of the proletariat. In short, it would disappear from the face of the earth.

The specter of communism that haunted Europe in 1848, as recalled by Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto, has not vanished. The bourgeois counterrevolution, strengthened by the advent of Stalinism in the 1920s, has so far managed to secure the continuity of bourgeois and anti-proletarian political power for a hundred years. This gives the impression to bourgeoisies worldwide that they are invincible, able to wield their power with all the ferocity they can muster, massacring millions of defenseless people and destroying the environment with their disastrous economic system for the sole purpose of accumulating profits and capital. But, historically, this is the same impression that every dominant class has had in different epochs, from the slave-owning to the feudal, and which the capitalist bourgeois class has merely inherited. What will once again surprise the bourgeoisie and sow terror in its circles of power – whether public or secret – will be the rebirth of the revolutionary proletarian movement. A movement that does not arise accidentally or from the will of some “visionary leader,” but from the economic foundations of the capitalist mode of production itself, in which the antagonism between the general interests of the bourgeoisie and those of the proletariat is generated. And this not in “one country,” but in all countries of the world, albeit with differing strength and timing. The historical fact remains that the bourgeoisie systematically uses its class antagonism against the proletariat in every country. This does not prevent it from seeking methods of power management that allow it to draw into its own field of interests part or even most of the proletarian masses, especially when, after long and crushing defeats in the revolutionary struggle, these masses have been left without political class leadership and without organizations of economic class defense.

The defeat that Stalinism and its later offshoots, adapted to the historical and social traditions of various countries, inflicted on the world level gave bourgeois and capitalist conservatism decades of life, even though capitalist development was heading – as Marxism predicted from its earliest steps – toward increasingly severe and profound economic, financial, social, and war crises.

The ferocity with which the Israeli bourgeoisie – today carried out by its far-right factions rather than by its “left” factions that practiced it in earlier times – lashes out against the Palestinian population under the pretext of Hamas “terrorism,” is yet another example of how the ruling bourgeois class, in view of ever more acute economic and social crises and fearing the rebirth of the proletarian class movement, reacts preventively in an attempt to suppress any germ of class reaction contained in the ever-worsening living conditions of the Palestinian proletarian and proletarianized masses. May their reaction to the deadly oppression they have suffered for over a century at the hands of Israeli state terrorism – and to which they episodically respond with the classic weapon of the oppressed, individual terrorism – never contaminate the proletarian masses of other Arab countries, or even the Israeli proletariat itself, so far united in defending the specific interests of its own bourgeoisie, which has drawn it into its camp with economic and social privileges that have lasted thanks to U.S. support. The United States is interested not only in ensuring that the State of Israel strengthens itself, but also in having it serve as a serious and heavily armed threat to all Middle Eastern and North African countries in case any of their governments intend to ally themselves with Washington’s imperialist rivals.

On August 20, Trump made a statement regarding Netanyahu in which he expressed the true sentiment of American imperialism: “Netanyahu is a good man, a war hero, he is like me!” Naturally, the extermination of the civilian population of Gaza in order to seize the land where they have lived for centuries – so as to exploit it in ways most favorable to Israeli-American profiteering – becomes the necessary means to close an important stage in the imperialist “solution” of the Palestinian question. Next in line: the West Bank....

While Trump plays the “great statesman” in relation to the war in Ukraine, in cahoots with his worthy counterpart Putin, with the general design of making his European allies take on the role of warmongers under the illusion of bending Russia to their “peace conditions,” while he himself aims at the Nobel Peace Prize, he allows himself the liberty of rejoicing at Israel’s exterminatory military initiatives. Israel, moreover, is using the military repression in Gaza – and soon, in the West Bank – as a live training ground to test the most effective means, strategies, and timing for occupying an entire territory and destroying all resistance. Imperialist governments and the major arms and high-tech companies are grateful, while making profits on the backs of millions of human beings.

None of this will disappear with the stroke of a sponge, nor thanks to petitions and humanitarian demonstrations, nor thanks to the “distancing” statements of this or that government while everything remains exactly as it is. It will be class struggle – what the proletariat must finally reclaim as its only and decisive struggle against all oppression, all repression, all bourgeois wars. This struggle does not aim at some compromise between imperialist powers, nor at a truce, long or short, awaiting renewed destruction and repression. It aims at class unity among proletarians, so that their struggle inspires class solidarity among proletarians of other countries, especially in the imperialist countries.

Great is the responsibility of the proletarians of the imperialist countries, and in this case of the Israeli proletarians: a people that oppresses another people can never be a free people, Marx declared. But the freedom of which Marxism speaks has nothing to do with bourgeois freedom, for the latter is reduced to the freedom to exploit the proletarian masses of the world and the weaker peoples of the world; the freedom to destroy and kill millions of human beings for the sole purpose of keeping the economic and political system of capitalism alive.

The proletarians will once again reclaim their “living space,” which is none other than the terrain of class struggle – the only ground on which all the world’s proletarians can recognize themselves as a social and revolutionary force. This force is truly invincible, because history is on its side, even if today no concrete resumption of class struggle can yet be seen. To the imperialist world war that the bourgeoisies of the great powers are preparing, the proletariat – if it does not want to resign itself to becoming nothing more than cannon fodder – must respond by preparing its own class war. Revolutionary communists, no matter if few and present only in some countries, are working today for that tomorrow.

Il comunista - le prolétaire - el proletario - proletarian - programme communiste - el programa comunista - Communist Program