The genocide implemented by the State of Israel against the proletarians in and around the Gaza Strip (leaving aside for the moment the „deeds” of Israeli settlers supported by their army in the West Bank) has not „only“ been responsible for 60 thousand or, according to some independent sources, 100 thousand deaths. How many future deaths are to come due to the consequences of crippling injuries, the impossibility of surviving after the loss of limbs, of being unable to access the necessary treatment for pre-existing health conditions or those that may have developed over whole months of unceasing slaughter or that will occur in the near future because of devastated hospital facilities? Or else, far more cruelly, due purely to hunger and malnutrition. There are many faces to genocide. The physical and material devastation from air, land and sea attacks on towns, villages and countryside is increasingly rendering more or less the whole of the region uninhabitable: how is survival possible amongst the tottering skeletons of the few houses still standing, along streets wiped out by bombing, amidst dry and unusable cisterns and water pipes, wrecked drainage and blown-up electricity networks, on a territory made uninhabitable by land-mines, radioactive munitions and poisoned soil and sub-soil?

Under the pressure of the world crisis of the capitalist mode of production, the situation in the Middle East is getting more critical, day by day.  However it may develop in the near future, the war between Israel and Iran is, at one and the same time, a symptom and an accelerator, adding to its gravity.

The State of Israel, already committed to ethnic cleansing in and around Gaza, is performing to perfection the role it was assigned right after the Second World War by the victorious imperialist powers, first and foremost the USA and USSR closely followed by France and England: the role and function of armed gendarme, paid and supported by the interests of world capitalism, at the heart of a region bursting with crude oil, gas and other precious raw materials, as well as being a crossroads of international trade.  On their part, all the local bourgeoisies (Arab or not) have done, whether laymen or bigots, corrupt and reactionary, fearful of the more powerful imperialisms, has been to hang on as hard as they can to the deposits of black gold, following the scent of money, no matter whether dollars, rubles, euros or yen.

Only a few months ago, when commenting the outcome of America’s presidential elections, we concluded that for some time now in the United States there has been “an often dramatic social situation affecting almost all sectors of the workforce across every region of this vast country. Struggles have multiplied over the years, sometimes conducted by official trade unions with a shameful history behind them and facing strong pressure from workers; and sometimes as an expression of grassroots organizations, which are something of a novelty in the complicated post-World War II era. It’s very simple: workers in the land that symbolizes imperialist domination are in dire straits and can’t take it any more”. And we recalled the series of struggles and unrest that had broken out in diverse sectors in the world of work, from the dockers to the Boeing workers, from workers in the food industry to the coal miners of Alabama, from the joiners, to the installers, to the maintenance staff of telephone companies, from the Amazon workforce to that of the service sector and the so-called gig economy and so on (see: “A Few Words about the US Elections“, the internationalist, no. 11/2025).

We are totally unsurprised by the recent events upsetting the world, bringing discussions over the „third world war“ into bars and TV talk shows. We are not interested here in attacking the more or less fascist bourgeois right wing: it is a declared enemy. The problem instead consists in the reformist false friends, pacifists and democrats: all of whom have deceived and continue to deceive our class, maintaining that it is still possible to improve capitalism, eliminating its contradictions. At times they even pretend they’re communists: but communism is the active and organised negation of bourgeois rule, both in its democratic and in its fascist guises. Being communist means opposing all imperialist wars, declaring open war on capital and first and foremost on our own bourgeoisie.

For days, months, years, the war in Ukraine, the massacres in the Middle East, Trump’s electoral victory and its immediate consequences, the crisis in Germany and the outcome of its elections, the “advance of the right” more or less everywhere, the realisation of Europe’s political inexistence, the  increasingly urgent “debate” over European rearmament and much more have stirred up a bedlam of reflections and interpretations from the most dissimilar to the most inventive: an ideological desert that reduces everything to a clash between “the free world” and “autocracy”, between “progressives” and “oligarchics”, to sum up between Good and Evil – further evidence of the inability to produce a materialist analysis of what is going on.

As we write, news come of the umpteenth possible truce in the State of Israel’s tragic war (lasting since 1948!) of extermination and ethnic cleansing in the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, Lebanon and the „Syrian“ Golan Heights. Of course, we shall return to the content of this possible truce and above all to its successive developments, without launching into the only too foreseeable merry-go-round of geo-political analyses and and hypotheses.  But some things should continue to be clear.  Whatever the immediate outcome of this bloody situation, another poisoned fruit of imperialist dynamics, it is evident that there will be no release, whether political, military or humanitarian.

Once again, now that the Great American Electoral Circus has finally upped sticks and left town (democracy at its finest, complete with colourful balloons and strobe lights, a howling public and candidates constrained to perform impossiblly acrobatic back-somersaults in rhetoric to say something meaningful), we can spend a few words on an ignoble farce that has become increasingly vulgar, grotesque and void of content.

At the moment of writing, between the middle and end of August 2024, we await the response from Iran and the Lebanese Hezbollah to the killing in Teheran of Hamas’ political leader Isma’il Haniyeh by the State of Israel - a response which, as well as leading to a halt in the basically inconclusive to and fro of meetings between the two parts, might also result in a dangerous spread of the conflict over an increasingly devastated Middle East. For the time being Iran doesn’t seem to be over-willing to stage a real show of power, preferring to limit itself to demagogic threats: but  at the moment things are still in a state of flux and we must see how they evolve, without launching into rocambolesque geo-political forecasts. Meanwhile, the slaughter of Palestinian proletarians proceeds unceasingly in its savagery and indifference to all indignation, humanitarian protest or rhetoric from other international brigands: the deaths now amount to around 40 thousand but the future, lethal, physical and pscho-physical consequences will be infinitely greater and more devastating than this obscene genocide, typical of capitalism in its imperialist phase (how easy it is to forget the millions of proletarians, civilians and soldiers, massacred in two world bloodbaths, and the hundreds of “minor wars” that preceded, accompanied and followed them!). As to the “Pro-Palestine” demonstrations that have multiplied and proliferated more or less all over the world in the last few months, apart from the ritual, pre-electoral mega-demo at the Democratic Convention in Chicago, they seem to be languishing:  university students are on holiday and though the mobilisation of the Palestinian communities abroad is not diminishing in terms of numbers, it still remains caged inside a fallacious “nationalist” prospective (not to speak of the so-called fellow travellers in the older imperialist cities, the “hardcore resisters” who so irresponsibly exalt and fuel that prospective, just proving that they are simply “standing in line”… to put it kindly!).