We would like to thank the editors of the blog leftdis.wordpress.com for translating our article in english.
With the dramatic acceleration imparted on the morning of Oct. 7, the Palestinian question and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict suddenly returned to all the front pages of the international press and to the center of political debate in the imperialist metropolises. The operations launched from the Gaza Strip, politically controlled by the Islamist organization Hamas, and the Israeli reaction have imparted a new rhythm, a renewed intensity to a situation of conflict, now latent now overt, that has never ceased to mark the Palestinian Territories, their relations with the Israeli state, their condition of oppression.
One can understand the disgust in the face of the revolting hypocrisy churned out in industrial doses by the bourgeoisies in good standing with democratic pedigree (or aspiring to such recognition) and their mighty ideological apparatuses, which, in the face of the rockets fired indiscriminately by Hamas on Israeli cities, to the kidnappings and massacres of Israeli civilians carried out by the commandos of this formation, have suddenly discovered the violence that has been branding this area for nearly a century, having ignored years of systematic violence carried out by the authorities, the repressive system of the Israeli bourgeoisie, and the settlers protected by the overwhelming force of the Israeli state.
It is an understandable disgust that must not, however, blind our ability to analyze the serious and important facts from a class perspective.
We must not prevent ourselves from elaborating and proposing a reading of this crisis that can contribute to a coherently revolutionary and internationalist political approach, striving always to call a spade a spade, even at the cost of recognizing facts that, however unfavorable to our expectations and prospects for a social upheaval of today’s dominant imperialist arrangements, cannot be overlooked.
A necessary condition for trying to offer a key and a class political approach to the crux of the failure to resolve the Palestinian national question is to recognize how for a long time now this question – abetted by the very serious weakness of the Palestinian bourgeoisie accentuated more and more as the presences, intrusions, and action of regional and world powers play out around it – has been fully and deeply absorbed as a subordinate factor in global imperialist dynamics. To think today that the Palestinian bourgeoisie can lead a struggle for national emancipation from positions of real if relative autonomy is totally illusory. Not only that, over the past few decades, the possibility that the solution to the Palestinian national question could be the outcome, subject to innumerable conditioning and subservience, of a show of force by the Arab states against Israel has also drastically faded.
Only two scenarios, today very abstract and very difficult to realize, could reopen the way for a real solution to the Palestinian national question through the struggle for the formation of a genuine, sovereign, fully functioning Palestinian state entity: a profound upheaval of international balances and arrangements capable of shaking up the network of alliances, of imperialistic connections that make up much of Israel’s strength as a regional power, and restoring breath to a joint action of bourgeoisies with their favorable states to revive, obviously for their own interests, the Palestinian cause; or, a radical change of class paradigm, a broad and intense revival of proletarian conflict at the international level, within which new spaces, new roles, new tasks in interpreting and leading a struggle against the culpable impotence of its own bourgeoisie and against the regime of oppression of the Israeli bourgeoisie and state can open up for the Palestinian proletariat.
In the absence of these options, the Palestinian proletariat, forced into a condition of terrible economic and social fragility, will remain subject to the effects of the maneuvers that, above its own head, are deployed and interwoven by regional bourgeoisies and powers of imperialism. It will remain directly subjected to the iron heel of Israeli repression and to all the bargaining, corruption, intrigue, and most sordid and mean-spirited operations of a Palestinian bourgeoisie perhaps never historically so succubus to the evolving global imperialist framework and so lacking in autonomous bargaining power.
The operation launched by Hamas military formations, presented as the ultimate demonstration of the ability to strike at Israel’s interests and security and probably really close today to the limit of the offensive possibilities of this Palestinian deployment, has so far essentially limited itself to civilian targets, without being able to scratch the Israeli military apparatus in the slightest. The Israeli state has to cash in on a significant blow to its prestige as a military power capable of proverbially ensuring the security of its citizens and the integrity of its national space. But the immense imbalance in the balance of power actually comes out confirmed by the recent swirling succession of military actions and reactions. On the one hand, rocket launches and seizures, on the other, armored units and air raids; on the one hand, brief incursions into enemy territory presented as stunning successes, on the other hand, the planning of the occupation of the Gaza Strip by means of a vast ground operation and the planned intervention against the power centers of the adversary. The Hamas offensive has no chance of proving decisive in the terms of the Palestinian national question. Today the option of resolving the Palestinian national question manu militari with a victory on the ground against Israel has no chance. The Hamas leadership knows it and their international godfathers know it.
It is on other planes, on other levels, according to other logics that the October 7 attack took shape. In the background of the attack launched from the Gaza Strip is the growing marginalization of the Palestinian issue on the international stage, with increasing signs of normalization of relations between Israel and Arab states such as the Saudi kingdom, there is the bitter division in the Palestinian political world – a factor that should never be overlooked in understanding Palestinian developments and in relations with Israel – with Hamas certainly not as of today aiming to establish itself as the genuine champion of the Palestinian cause against other political formations such as Abu Mazen’s Palestinian National Authority. The fact that these internal rivalries within the Palestinian political field and the attempt to make the Palestinian question regain international centrality have led to a raising of the level of the confrontation to such an extent as to expose the Territories to the risk of an Israeli reprisal of particular harshness and with effects that could be radical, testifies to the state of difficulty, isolation, and weakness of the Palestinian cause and of the bourgeoisie that is supposed to represent its historical interpreter.
The drama we feel most strongly is in the fact that this weakness, these dangerous attempts to spread the cards of international political dynamics, these risky gambles launched by a bourgeoisie succubus to larger bourgeois games and desperately short of energy and protections, have had as their price the atrocious exposure of the Palestinian proletariat to the violence of the powerful Israeli military apparatus. Not only that, the terrible spiral of actions and reactions generated by the oppression of the solid Israeli bourgeoisie and its state and the weak and subordinate initiatives of the Palestinian bourgeoisie is bound to deepen and entrench even more hatreds, national, ethnic and religious resentments, recompacting in the false solution of the union sacrée with its own bourgeoisies the proletariat of the region and making the possibility of a class and internationalist presence in the area, the only way out of this maelstrom of nationalism and barbarism, more arduous and more distant than it already was. Arduous and distant to the point of appearing even impossible today, and yet the only light of hope, the only authentic emancipatory prospect for the proletariat in the region, primarily Palestinian, locked in the pincer, in the trap of a tangle of bourgeois interests, of unequal bourgeois forces, of bourgeois aporias embedded in the fabric of a global imperialist reality that has lost all charge and progressive value.
Part of the “class left” in our corner of the world, even before the second Hamas rocket crashed on its target, already had the score ready for the usual and unfailing chorus in support “without ifs and buts” of a “resistance” never qualified in its bourgeois and reactionary nature. The mournful chant that accompanies the periodic, desultory third-class funeral to a false internationalism that punctually and unseemly falls apart in the face of the reappearance in the political and media limelight of the Palestinian national question. If, on the one hand, we witness, among a milieu of third-camp backgrounds – never landed, except verbally, in Marxist internationalism – the failure, in the face of the “call of the forest,” of inhibitory brakes that were never theoretically established, on the other hand it is impossible to ignore the conditioning brought about by the internal holding requirements of composite and petty political workshops, committed to not displeasing, to mediate, to compromise in order to preserve or expand boundaries that are increasingly undefined in a classist sense and thus increasingly marked in an opportunist sense. In the never “equidistant” stances of these entities, even in the abundance of references to the Palestinian proletariat and Israeli imperialism, in vain is the search for mention of two indisputable realities: a Palestinian bourgeoisie that cynically throws the lives of Gaza’s proletarians on the roulette wheel of its political bets and an Israeli proletariat whose members are counted by the dozens, if not hundreds, among the victims of the massacres of a reactionary militia. Well neither can we, as revolutionary internationalists, call ourselves “equidistant.” But our support “without ifs and buts” is reserved for the Palestinian and Israeli working class, against the Palestinian, Israeli and bourgeoisie of the imperialist and regional powers, regularly engaged in infecting the Middle East plague.
The duty to the international proletariat of the political subjectivities that today can look at this imperialist drama without being directly affected by it and without being overwhelmed by the fullness of its ideological fallout, is to keep the internationalist perspective alive, to defend and root this crucial element of proletarian identity, without which in the future of the crisis and wars of imperialism there will be no room for autonomous action for the defense and liberation of our class.
Prospettiva Marxista – Circolo internazionalista «coalizione operaia»
circolo internazionalista "coalizione operaia" 