It is now one year since the October 7th jail break from the Gaza concentration camp that preceded the ongoing genocide in the Gaza Strip perpetuated by the Israeli regime. Mass murder, war crimes have been the order of the day in Gaza, and increasingly the West Bank as the Zionist war machine enters its final death drive. Total siege of the Strip, and the destruction of 85% of Gaza’s infrastructure including basic services and shelter has led to starvation and disease, including the return of Polio. The Lancet puts the rolling death toll over the last twelve months at over 186,000, close to 10% of Gaza’s pre-genocide population.
Despite this all of the bourgeoisie media raise their voices to bemoan supposed ‘antisemitism’, to denounce the ‘mob’ in the streets and to defend Israel’s ‘right to defend itself’. From liberal bourgeois outfits such as Media publishing more muted ‘concerns’, to more tepid support for the Israeli state, and finally, to the more conservative news outlets espousing both brutal attacks on the Palestine solidarity movement and rabid defence of Israel, the Australian bourgeoise have desperately been trying to pull back public support for Palestine and temper condemnation of Israel. Recently the entire press has raised their anger over ‘terrorist’ flags at demonstrations, raising the ridiculous standard that it is illegal to support any other side in the genocide apart from the Zionist entity.
The Palestinian people have a right to self-determination and democracy, free of the 75 year-long Israeli colonial occupation and its brutal military dictatorship. Despite the wanton destruction imposed since October 7th on Palestine in both the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, and now the expansion of Israel’s rampage to Lebanon, where it has killed over 2,000 people. Israel is still refusing to accept an end to the slaughter, with the United States unwilling to impose one despite its verbal promises to do so. Thus, it seems that one year into the slaughter there is still no end in sight.
However, Israel’s internal contradictions, simmering before October 7th, have since blown open. The Israeli settler state is stuck in an awkward balance between two main political poles. The first main pole is the fascist settler strata, who demand the total destruction of the Palestinian people and the establishment of a theocratic, expansionist Greater Israel. Recently this has been most prominently expressed through riots in support of rapist Israeli soldiers, and subsequent pogroms against Palestinians throughout the West Bank. This has had the effect of stretching the Israeli state's image and internal stability. The second main pole, is Israel’s liberal Zionist ruling class faction strata, who are intent on maintaining the status quo. The status quo meaning the existing apartheid regime, and Israel’s position as a key US client state and proxy, maintaining control and safeguarding US influence. The illusion of the stability of such a project has been irreversibly damaged by the resistance of Palestinians to their subjugation, and the state’s inability to integrate Palestinians in a one state solution, whilst maintaining Israel as a Jewish-supremacist ethnostate. The Israeli working class is unwilling to give up the fruits awarded to them by Israel’s imperial core status and the colonisation of Palestinian land and the exploitation of their labour, but Israel’s expanding wars and genocide only strengthen the threats to Israel’s security and deplete its ability to extract forced labour from Palestinians, with almost all Palestinian labour from the West Bank, and all in its entirety in the case of the Gaza Strip, cut off since October 7th. This has had a weakening effect on the Israeli economy. Further weakened by millions emigrating, loss of investment confidence, Yemeni naval harassment, desertions, growing international pariah status, and the ongoing war costs, improvement does not appear to be on the horizon. The brutal total eradication of the Gaza Strip will not resolve Israel’s instability, nor will a reoccupation of the south of Lebanon.
Despite the Iran-aligned national bourgeoisie Axes of Resistance’s efforts, they are unable and unwilling to carry out the struggle for the liberation of Palestine to its conclusion: the necessary creation of a secular socialist republic in Palestine and the entirety of the Middle East. Such a path needs to be undertaken in order to remove the bourgeois comprador regimes for good, and to bring the working class to power.
Similarly, the legalist challenges though global bourgeoise institutions such as the United Nations and the International Court of Justice is stillborn, blocked by the imperialist powers who run these bodies into being either total ineffectual, unenforced and blocked. These bodies serve to defend the world system and resolve disputes among the international bourgeoisie, not to fight imperialism.
There is only one solution to the Palestinian question: Intifada, Revolution!
For a Socialist Democratic Republic of the Middle East!
Comments