The Virginia Worker

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The Virginia Worker Editorial Board Member Sal Rojo argues the only resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is rooted in a socialist and internationalist politics against the nationalisms of Zionists and Hamas

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Ever since the October 7th Hamas attacks on Israel the overwhelming majority of the Left has been mobilized around solidarity with Palestinians against the intensified Israeli assault on Palestinian territories carried out under the guise of liquidating Hamas.

The latter has been an embarrassingly threadbare cover for ethnic cleansing and land seizure enforced with extreme and indiscriminate violence against the population as a whole. During this latest Israeli campaign there have been noteworthy acts of solidarity such as the refusal by workers in some parts of the world to transport weapons shipments and military supplies destined to serve the Zionist state. Such action is a minimum baseline for working class internationalism in the struggle against imperialist war. It’s also one of the only effective means for workers everywhere to disrupt such wars waged in other corners of the globe.

It remains the case that the most effective action any group can take against imperialist war is that of workers primarily at the point of production — whether that be the workers at arms factories, dockworkers, or anywhere else along the supply chain that makes reactionary war possible. Despite the few instances of workers along these supply chains engaging in stoppages, it still falls far short of what is needed to have a substantive material effect on this war.

The majority of leftist effort is based on ineffective consumer activism calling for boycotts of capitalist enterprises that contract with Israel or the boycotting of Israeli goods themselves. Many are still focused on symbolic protesting, as well as petitioning imperialist politicians for ceasefires or voting down state funds to Israel — all these efforts will on their own remain ineffective.

There is a general confusion not only about what tactics are effective but what strategic end goal they serve. The Left, as reflected in their tactics, tails the nationalist politics of organizations like Hamas. It would be one thing if the Left openly declared themselves to be ideologically aligned with anti-Western nationalism (some do) but many proclaim their adherence to Marxist socialism which is inherently antithetical to nationalism — a political and ideological project which can only serve the class interests of the bourgeoisie, a project which among the Palestinian people finds its foremost representative in Hamas.

In the war in Palestine there is no serious force fighting for a progressive resolution to the contradiction between the dominant capitalist nationalism of Israel and the subordinate capitalist nationalism of Hamas. There is no serious consideration of what a socialist strategy and working class politics is in this conflict. 

Much of the Left has decided to implement either the outdated Leninist formula or the opportunist Stalinist policy of support for “national liberation” in the 21st century. That no group seems to have a concrete analysis of the class composition of Palestine or Israel and implicitly assumes as if there still is a peasant question to be resolved (which was always the material base at the core of Leninist support for national liberation movements in the first half of the 20th century) shows the lack of seriousness among socialists in our time.

It is precisely the weakness and insignificance of socialists today in relation to political power everywhere which leads them to hitch their wagons to bourgeois nationalist movements in the hopes of maybe one day in the future making the dictatorship of the proletariat a plausible idea. 

Opportunism has never led to more favorable circumstances for the working class and socialist movement to seize state power. The only thing it has done is kept workers across the globe subordinate to the interests of one faction of capitalists over another. Even the debate on a “one state” or “two state” solution regarding Palestine is based on this logic. At best we can expect from these considerations either another capitalist partition of India-type conflict, which hasn’t resolved the ethnic tensions between the peoples of the region, or a capitalist South African post-apartheid republic where the dominant ethnic group led by its capitalist class will retain economic and social control over a single republic. 

None of these scenarios offer a socialist republic led by a multinational working class — the only way to resolve the Palestinian question. When marxists say the only resolution to capitalist contradictions is through the realization of communism we are not joking. There is no third way between socialism and barbarism. Barbarism is all that is being offered by Israel and Hamas. That one side is better armed and supported by western imperialism doesn’t by default make the other side the  “good guy” to support, even “critically.” That so many self professed socialists or communists ditch the primacy of class for the nation is the abandonment of the ABCs of marxism and an embrace of revisionism and its political expression in opportunism. 

Everywhere in which national liberation was achieved against imperialism has only resulted in the dominance of a national capitalist class over workers and peasants still integrated into the imperialist world system. Now that around a century has passed since the Comintern policies of support to national liberation were enacted and these liberated nations have proletarianized the vast majority of their peoples, the question is no longer how to lead a bourgeois democratic revolution against feudalism and imperialism even as the first stage of socialist revolution under proletarian leadership, but of a socialist revolution of the proletarian masses and their party to install a working class state power against their national capitalist class and other nations’ capitalist classes.

The labor-capital contradiction has never been as stark as it is today. The issue and its resolution is between the global working class and the global capitalist class. This is as true in Palestine and Israel as it is in the US or China. It’s time to get our bearings.