Once again in the Middle East an enormous proletarian bloodbath is being prepared: what we saw in mid-November 2012 was just a foretaste. After a week of Israeli air- and sea-raids on the Gaza Strip, there have been 150 deaths, including women and children, amidst the destruction of houses and whole neighbourhoods. A truce is agreed: it may last, it may not. They say that preparations are being made to intervene in Iran and for an attack in Syria. Whatever happens, it is certain that fresh blood will be shed, so that Bourgeois Law and Order may make itself evident to a world shaken by unrest and proletarian struggles. Faced with the crisis of overproduction, which has been raging for five years now arousing as yet feeble responses from the proletariat, the imperialist States, terrorized by the merely remote possibility that the class war might explode and spread, are preparing the battleground, elaborating their strategies, taking the measure of their own strength and that of others involved. Israel calls what is really an act of retaliation and the decimation of the civilian population “the right to self-defence”. It is not a question of Palestinians and Israelis, Jews and Muslims, but of proletarians used as a shield to defend a Bourgeois Dictatorship that is bound for destruction.
The dismantling of Libya was child’s play, partly to avoid any possible line of continuity between the Tunisian and Egyptian proletariat. The massacre of the population of Iraq, after having set the peoples of Iran and Iraq at war one against the other for eight years with a million dead, was a path of lethal, two-phase conflict. The attack on Afghanistan was and continues to be another “masterly move”, with its attending inventions of “humanitarian wars”, “the exportation of democracy” and the hunt for the new “evil-doer”. Then came the turn of Syria. The Middle East, where it was decided to forcefully settle the Israeli State (a deadly and highly modern war machine), is a fragile fault, one of the most dangerous on the planet, fed and foraged by increasingly lethal weapons. It is an experimental terrain, a battleground: not only for war itself, but above all for civil and anti-proletarian war. Here the Horsemen of the Apocalypse, guided by the USA, erect and dismantle fictitious states arising out of the colonial shares of European imperialism. The toy-missiles of the Palestinian bourgeoisie (slight in comparison to the bourgeois beast of Israel) do not affect the latter in the least: they are an opportunity - not a problem - to unleash an inferno, the last of which, four years ago, called “Operation Cast Lead” caused the death of 1400 proletarians and the wounding of thousands.Here, on the borders and inland, run mile upon mile of walls: this has never scandalized anyone. The peace of the cemeteries is a cheap article of commercial goods (the “Road Map” was the latest version of it) and here it reaches the peaks of the spirit of pacifism and patriotism. Not a year goes past without the commodity of “peace” losing value and the massacres are a resource for boosting the price of it.
All this has nothing to do with the so-called “Palestinian national question” and yet this is discussed ad nauseam. The enemy of the Palestinian proletariat is in Gaza as in Tel Aviv, in Amman as in Damascus, in Beirut as in Cairo and in Tunis. Imperialism and anti-imperialism use the proletariat as guinea pigs for sacrifice in the horrendous war that they are seriously preparing to play out, proposing once again a “national issue” devoid of sense. For at least three decades, despite everything, the Palestinian proletariat has no longer acted out of national interests but out of class interests, against the bandits of the Metropolises and the petit bourgeoisie: nonetheless, bands of rebels, mercenaries, partisans of all descriptions, continue to roam the roads of the Middle East with the task of boosting the market of nationalist ideology. The new Egyptian and Tunisian authorities, as well as the Turkish, do not come to offer support to the proletarians but to the Palestinian petit bourgeoisie and middle classes. Not only this: they are no deterrent to the drones and deadly missiles of Israel but act as careful observers and monitors of a situation that causes alarm – the growth of a proletariat that may escape any control of a social or economic nature. There are too many with nothing to lose and no homeland: a mortal danger!
Only idiots believe that the Israeli bourgeoisie wishes to impose its “own” strategy of death on the world. This is not the case! It is perfectly integrated with the bourgeoisie of the other great powers, is aware of the timing for its war games and sticks to it. Only imbeciles believe that the so-called “Arab spring” has changed anything in the tactics and strategy of the Middle Eastern bourgeoisie. After its attack on the Egyptian proletariat, our good old democracy, rediscovered in the name of the Muslim Brotherhood, is already prepared to take the Gaza Strip under its control and participate in the great banquet of tomorrow
In the meantime, the “national-communists”, spread throughout the world both in governments and outside them and keeping the struggles of the proletariat under control, continue to stir the soup of nationalism, encouraging the Palestinian proletariat to fight for a cause that it has paid and is still paying an enormous price for, the slaughter carried out by both bourgeoisies, Israeli and Palestinian: “Versaillais and Prussians” alike, as in the Paris Commune. Wherever you turn there is a bourgeoisie, Arabic or not, there are the patriotic reserve troops and the mercenaries shooting you in the back. Since the “Black September” of Amman, at Tel al-Zaatar, Sabra and Chatila, all the butchers on both sides have done is to strew death and destruction in the refugee camps and in the suburbs of Beirut. The anti-imperialist and anti-Zionist issues that Palestinian nationalism (followed in this by the old and new petit bourgeoisie in developed countries, gathered together by the mass media of democracy) brings into the field, are not the arms of class war: they are the shields of a bourgeoisie that is just as corrupt as its Israeli equivalent and they serve to force the Palestinian proletariat to enrol in the nationalist ranks of Hamas and Abu Mazen and the Arab-Israeli proletariat in the rank and file of the State of Israel. The “Palestinian national question” is merely a political-ideological container that the bourgeoisie, Arabic or not, periodically revives to terrorize the Middle-Eastern proletariat. For a very long time now, proletarian strategy has no longer contemplated armed struggle for a Palestinian Bantustan, in its historical objective of the dictatorship of the proletariat, but the overthrow of all the States in the area, Arab and non-Arab. The “rights of the Palestinian people”, or of the Palestinian bourgeoisie, have nothing in common with the immediate and historical interests of the “Palestinian proletariat”.
If it is true that the State of Israel is a State that combines within it imperialism, colonialism and fascism, thus possessing all the characteristics of a real democratic State to an exponential degree, it is just as true that in all the regions of the Middle East, in all the states, monarchies and republics, whether only slightly or extremely democratic, the exploitation of the “internationalized working class” has reached an intolerable level. If religious and nationalist ideology is promoted by both bourgeoisies, this is precisely in order to bring out the reactionary dynamics in the middle classes, the petit bourgeoisie, the Israeli working-class aristocracy and the lumpen-proletariat of both countries in a territory now unified by Capital: at the heart of both Islam and Zionism lies none other than the reactionary heart of the Middle East, integrated in both cases by nationalism and bourgeois imperialism.
Unfortunately the combative old working class in the metropolises has been induced to forget that it possesses an enormous revolutionary potential: it has not yet regained an awareness either of the social prison in which it is confined, or of the class brotherhood which unifies it with the working class of the Middle East. For this to happen, it will take a harsh and inevitable struggle to surprise and radically overturn all the reformist illusions: not until then will the first sparks of class consciousness be recognizable, in the spreading need to get organized. And in this necessary transition the working class will rediscover, both in the metropolises and in the outskirts, in the south and in the north of the world, in the old and in the new imperialist states, the revolutionary party that will accompany it and be its sole guide: in seizing power!
International Communist Party
