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!).  

In the articles, leaflets and comments we have devoted to the umpteenth massacre being perpetrated for months now in the Gaza Strip by the State of Israel, we have always insisted on using the term proletariat and not “people”: Palestinian or Arab or Middle-Eastern proletariat. This is not a linguistic quirk: “people” refers to all classes; it is an inter-classist term which implies a national vision, whilst our perspective – the one within and for which we have always worked as communists – is one that, particularly in the imperialist phase, centres on a single class, the proletarian class, and which therefore does not identify with the “people”, the “Nation”, the “Fatherland” or the bourgeois State. In fact it opposes all of them and doing so (only by doing so!) prepares our class for its own revolution. These are the terms in which we replied to those who criticised a leaflet of ours in the context of a demonstration, arrogantly and aggressively moreover, because it attacked “the Arab bourgeoisies in the region (including the Palestinian)”, for their long-term betrayal of the proletariat in Gaza and the West Bank. We are not suprised, however: we are well aware that ours is a minority perspective and goes against the current: but there are no other paths and all the presumed shortcuts only lead to disaster and more proletarian blood being uselessly spilled.

The protests of American university students against the war unleashed by the Israeli state in the Gaza Strip – an act of outright butchery bordering on genocide, involving the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian population and, most importantlly, of the proletariat and proletarianised masses – have now spread, domino-efffect, to parts of Europe and elsewhere.There’s no point going into the ins and outs of what’s actually happening because media outlets have been providing ‘information’ on the situation for weeks now (it’s mid-May at time of writing). We would, instead, prefer to concentrate on one or two crucial matters, thereby ensuring that gut reactions to the capitalist mode of production’s most recent death throes do not pass unobserved.

The proliferation and intensification of the conflicts between imperialisms in areas such as the Middle and Far East, Africa and Europe itself (we won’t repeat once again the list of explosive situations or those already in flames) are sparking off repercussions on all levels. “Public discourse” (or ideological mobilisation) related to the need for “European rearmament” is stepping up, since – as Charles Michel, President of the European Council has recently had reason to declare – “if we want peace, we must prepare for war.” Words and expressions like “escalation”, “war economy”, “defending our trade routes”, when referring to specific episodes such as the war in Ukraine or the tense situation in the Red Sea, are more and more frequently heard, so that the fatigued ears of Holy Public Opinion can gradually get used to them. Moreover, more in detail, the prospect of an approaching third world war (the inevitable outlet for this mode of production and its profound crisis of over-production since the conclusion of the cycle of expansion following the end of the second world war) brings dangerously to the surface the contradictions implicit in all positions that fail to identify with revolutionary Marxism or – worse still! – proclaim they do, only to betray it by their actions.

No need for many words:  only the pathetically deluded fail to see that, in the depths of the capitalist economy, with the peaks and dips in its decades-long crisis, a new and widespread conflict is being prepared - one even more devastating than the two past world wars and the countless “minor wars” that preceded and followed them:  the last of the series, the war in Ukraine, and the slaughter of the Palestinian proletarians in and around Gaza.

We will not allow the title of “defenders of peace and human rights” to be claimed by those who have never offered anything but an economic and social system that perpetrates daily the violent exploitation of wage work over the majority of humankind, and destroys the natural resources of our planet, everywhere and mercilessly – an economic and social system that has now become intolerable.

The ferocity with which, since 1948, the State of Israel has carried out the role entrusted to it (not without conflicts between them) by the victorious powers in the second world slaughterhouse - that of armed gendarme in defense of an area swollen with oil, a reservoir of cheap manpower, pregnant with current and potential social tensions – sums up to the nth degree what is happening in these days and weeks in and around the Gaza Strip.

Every war is preceded, accompanied and followed by an intense, suffocating ideological mobilization.

We have considered it more than opportune to republish here the evaluations and comments from early 2009 devoted by our Party to the battle that had broken out then in those very months (Operation Cast Lead) as a new chapter in the interminable war that the State of Israel is waging with the complicity and direct responsibility of all the “Arab” states in the region - a complicity which, up until the “Yom Kippur war” and then the Lebanese attack, took place with an apparent military confrontation and then through diplomatic dialogue, ending up with political and economic agreements.  From “Operation Cast Lead” to the one now going on, called “Operation Iron Swords”, nothing has basically changed, if not the exponential increase in the military power unleashed in the Gaza Strip onto a defenceless population, in a bloodbath that now verges on genocide.