by Arjae Red, published on Workers World, October 20, 2023
On Oct. 7, the Palestinian people and their combat organizations launched a powerful attack against Israeli occupation forces and their settlements that they called “Al Aqsa Flood.” Their maneuver peeled away the Zionist state’s false sense of supremacy and demonstrated that even with billions of U.S. dollars and high-tech weaponry, Israel is far from invincible.
Now, Oct. 15, with U.S. naval forces positioned in the eastern Mediterranean Sea, and the imperialist media machine in a full frenzy attacking Hamas and vilifying the Palestinian people as a whole, the fight for Palestinian liberation has reached a critical stage that requires the world’s working class to join the fight.
U.S. aid to Israel each year amounts to $3 billion to $4 billion, with a new $2 billion aid package announced just a few days ago. The overwhelming majority of this is military aid. Every penny sent to Israel to fund genocide against Palestinians, or sent to Ukraine to fund a proxy war against Russia, is money that was collected from workers in the U.S. These workers must go without healthcare and adequate housing, are drowning in debt, and live in an increasingly dilapidated country that casts the rights and interests of those who generate the wealth aside.
Why is our tax money used to fund war and genocide across the world instead of improving the lives of working-class and oppressed people here? Because these military adventures are what keep the imperialist ruling class on the top of the global food chain. Israel is a military outpost for world imperialism, a foothold in a resource-rich region from which capitalist colonialism intends to extract everything.
Who do the Palestinians fight?
It is not only the Israeli military and their settler militias that the Palestinians must fight for national liberation. It is the whole global capitalist-imperialist ruling class.
By attacking Israeli occupation and Zionist settler-state ideology, the working-class movement is attacking world imperialism and the capitalist system itself. The capitalist ruling class knows this well, and that is why all imperialist governments and the corporate media unanimously and viciously denounce the Palestinian resistance. Republicans, Democrats, Fox, CNN, etc., all speak with one voice and one script when excusing or ignoring the crimes of Israel while vilifying Palestinians.
U.S. dollars and bombs are used to spill Palestinian blood, for the benefit only of the microscopic minority of capitalists who sit at the head of the military-industrial complex and the world imperialist system. The liberation of Palestine and the defeat of Zionist colonialism would be a serious setback for imperialism.
Such liberation would inspire further uprisings from colonized and working-class and oppressed peoples the world over — including the hundreds of Native Nations and other oppressed nations within the U.S. imperial core, as well as other sovereign peoples designated as colonial property.
In Africa, this process has already begun, with French colonialist forces and their neocolonial proxies being overthrown and expelled throughout the Sahel, and the U.S. forces under pressure to leave.
In Europe, NATO member regimes have had to reach deep into their pockets to fund the proxy war against Russia, often against the interests of their own national
capitalists and always against the interests of their working-class populations, while the war has devolved into a protracted stalemate with heavy Ukrainian casualties.
Imperialism’s dominant position is on the decline, and there is an opportunity for the working class and oppressed peoples of the whole world to hurry that decline along.
The fight for Palestine’s national liberation is in a new phase and is part of this worldwide class struggle. The working class must take sides, and with conviction. The fate of the Palestinian people is inextricably tied to the fate of all working-class people.
*Featured Image: Buffalo, New York, Oct. 10, 2023. (WW Photo: Arjae Red)