The Virginia Worker

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Virginia Worker Editorial Board Member Rick Amherst responds to Sal Rojo’s latest editorial ‘Neither Zionism Nor Hamas’ on what they think the priorities should be for marxists on the Palestinian Question

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I appreciate Comrade Sal Rojo’s timely remarks on Palestine and attempt to draw a line of demarcation that resists a tendency towards petty boosterism. However, Rojo’s statement is ultimately deficient in as much as it neglects to distinguish between two issues: the long term goal of the total liberation of the Palestinian people and the immediate goal of stopping the current round of genocide against the people of Gaza.  Even if we table the discussion on whether Lenin’s ideas on national liberation are outdated, this shortcoming is glaring.

Comrade Rojo correctly understands that a multinational worker’s republic with an internationist orientation is the only answer to the oppression of Palestinians, and that Hamas is a nationalist, non-Marxist organization that will not achieve this goal. Fair enough.

But Rojo only gives passing mention to the immediate specificities that Gaza is facing. Around half of the housing units in Gaza have been destroyed or damaged. Nearly 85% of Gazans are displaced, and most of the infrastructure necessary to have a functioning economy has been obliterated.

Even before October 7^th, Gaza’s economy has been strangled by Israel. The majority of the population subsists on foreign aid (sometimes supplemented by wages, sometimes not) and had nearly the highest unemployment rate in the world. Gaza has been severely de-developed and much of its population has been de-classed.

It is true that proletarian revolution has often emerged in the midst of the worst conditions and has emerged in places where the proletariat has not been in the majority of the population. But in those instances, an effective vanguard party had been built prior to those situations. What is left of Gaza’s proletariat can scarcely follow the October Road in the midst of genocide and such pervasive de-development.

Rojo cites workers in other countries who refuse to handle Israeli weapons as being praiseworthy. I agree. But Gaza’s workers have no such opportunities. These modalities of struggle are totally closed to them. (Additionally, I should mention that Rojo’s rejection of a boycott is baffling. Those workers who refuse to ship arms to Israel are explicitly following a boycott, and the full range of working class action has never, ever, been limited to the point of production. Workers should often privilege the point of production, but should not empty their arsenal of all other weapons). Those who profess communism struggle for a victory that is far from guaranteed, but we cannot become so enraptured with revolutionary optimism that we demand from the people what is literally impossible.

Gaza’s working class must recover and reorganize to make such a revolutionary push feasible. There are a few different situations which may help: greater integration of Palestine (Palestinians in the West Bank and the ’48 territories are less declassed and de-developed, though of course they are still oppressed and colonized), proletarian revolution in Jordan, Syria, Egypt, Lebanon, or elsewhere in the region, or a total end to the blockade of Gaza with opportunities to rebuild a genuine economy. But above all, the Palestinians of Gaza need breathing room. In this particular case, a durable ceasefire is not a liberal demand or lapse into sentimental moralism– it is a prerequisite to give the remaining workers of Gaza at least a fraction of the oxygen they need to actually organize for revolution at some later date.

If Hamas falls tomorrow, we cannot expect an outcome favorable to Palestine and its revolutionary prospects. Israel would surely use such a situation to fully exterminate the population or scatter them to the four winds. As much as we can condemn the boilerplate nationalism of Hamas, their effective battlefield perfomance may– though it is far from certain– provide the impetus for a settlement of the current conflict in such a way that eases the blockade or results in a ceasefire.

As revolutionary defeatists, our immediate slogans should emphasize the defeat of Israel and the United States above all else. Comrade Rojo, while not fully or explicitly rejecting this, at best obscures this point in his piece.