Today, nine days into a campaign of extermination by Israel, the Gaza strip is the largest open-air prison camp the world has seen. Commentators the world over are outraged by the carnage of the 1.5-million Gazans and the complicity of bourgeois governments in the West. True to form, the US vetoed a UNSC resolution condemning the ground offensive of yesterday, but no one should expect anything different. The UN is the pocket toy of the US, serving its interests. What is needed, amidst the condemnation of Israel’s aggression and the West’s (the EU and US) support for it, complicity of the Arab bourgeoisie and the pressure-politics of Hamas, is a political perspective that can carry the working class in the Middle East beyond the nationalist and religious concoctions on offer. First, however, we need to take a look at the argument justifying the Israeli state’s campaign of terror in Gaza.
There is one single view (the rest are mere regurgitations of the same thing) in support of Israel’s butchery in Gaza. Israel acts in self-defence, the view holds. It (Israel, it is) had no choice but to respond to the rocket attacks of Hamas on its population in southern Israel. Hamas, it says, broke the peace agreement by firing rockets into Israel and Israel exhibited great restraint by clutching the last fragile semblances of peace. Rubbish! There is nothing peaceful in a policy of lebensraum and starving a population to death through apartheid walls and unremitting incursions. An oppressed people have an inviolable right to free themselves from their oppressors by any means necessary, with their own organisations and methods of struggle. Going from one military adventure to another, now Lebanon, now Gaza, destroying entire civil societies are hardly actions of peace.
It is correct to defend Hamas against Israel’s state violence and the assassination of its leaders. But Hamas’ political outlook is a trap for the people it defends. It (Hamas) does not base its actions on the building of working class organs and a considered linking up with the working class across the Arab world. The call for the creation of some sort of state in Gaza de-linked from another mini-state in the West Bank is exactly the sort of balkanisation the working class and its allies in the Middle East can ill afford. It fuels the bankrupt policies of the Zionist regime, for the Israeli state yearns for the solution to expel the million odd Arabs living in its cities. This so-called “two-state phase” will be a fundamental step back for the struggling Palestinian people.
It is unlikely that Hamas will embrace an outlook basing its resistance against the US-Israeli violence on politics that transcend the national boundaries of Gaza and Israel, but this is exactly what is necessary. There must be a sustained effort to link the struggles of the working class of Gaza with the struggles of Israeli workers. Israel is a society based on tremendous inequality and the political reawakening of working class struggles in the Middle East, marked by the last few days’ popular outbursts against Israel and the rotten bourgeois Arab governments, is proof of an objective basis for a consistently working class policy of struggle in the region. No other process will bring lasting peace to Gaza, let alone the region.
The current unleashing of violence by Israel on Gaza is aimed at installing some government acceptable to the diktats of Israel — a sort of Middle East regime change. No doubt, beneath this all lies the incessant rivalry between the dollar and the euro. There is no need to justify the methods of struggle of the people of Gaza and their organisations. What is necessary is to measure these with the interests of the working class, refashion the tools of struggle and drive Israel and all bourgeois interests out with the hammer of mass working class action and the anvil of Gazan and Israeli worker solidarity.
Mundundu
About Lebanon. I did not have time to spell it out before. About a year ago there was a war in the Lebanon, and a lot of articles were written in the press. When the state of Lebanon was formed the Christians and Muslims were about 50/50 of the population. However, the Christians have small families and the Muslims do not. Now the Muslims are the majority and claim that now that the Christians are the minority, their status must be reduced and the constitution changed to a Muslim state. Much the same thing has been going on in Palestine where the population has quadrupled in 60 years. In a one state solution the Israelis would become the minority, and therefore be subjujated to genocide by the majority.
This is the problem with one man one vote democracy. Applys also to Zimbabe (Shona/Matabele) and Sri Lanka (Tamil minority).
Any solutions to suggest?
@ Steven….my question goes unanswered, but I understand the problems of contextualising “worker” interests in country where so many black people are unemployed.
I suppose you will argue that the ANC is not a “bourgeois government”
@ Anton: I have made the point elsewhere that the ANC embraced the free market more rapidly and thoroughly than the captains of capital expected – at the risk then of dislodging itself from its support base (without which it would have been useless to the sell-out project of capital). The ANC is thoroughly bourgeois – there is nothing to salvage from what can now be described as the rump of its former self. Just look at its branch ‘activities’ in the townships, the sum total of which is fighting for BEE contracts, positions in government and loading CV’s to place individuals in line for directorates of erstwhile enemy institutions. The bourgeoisification of the ANC was thorough, swift and irredeemable (students of politics will do well to map this transformation process, for it will expose the lie that the ANC is the custodian of transformation in SA; what makes it difficult for many people to see through the left rhetoric is when they look at the opposition, there’s really nothing to left of the ANC – everything stands to its right, politically speaking…now this should give you an idea of how far to the right the ANC has moved in every area of governance.
The fact that working class people vote the ANC into government and continue to support it simply attest to the history of bourgeois parties: they find a footing in the working class, for if they don’t, there would simply be no bourgeois parties around. The leitmust test is its politics.
What we don’t see in the ANC (and we don’t expect to see it there after the Harare Declaration, Codesa and the dumping of the [bourgeois - hey! I support bourgeois rights, but the manner I fight for it differs from how bourgeois politicians 'fight' for it] Freedom Charter for the RDP) is an attempt to see how every bit of policy decision is linked to an endeavour to place the needs of the majority of the citizens of SA above the drive for profits, in other words, link housing to the nationalisation of the cement industry, institute (as a matter of economic principle) a wealth tax to fund delivery of municipal services, etc, etc. The massive unemployment levels is linked to the structural vice grip the capitalist economy in South Africa is in. It is untenable to register growth in the economy of well over 3% pa and this does not go hand in hand with job creation (and the ANC are capitalism’s glorious administrators of this dichotomy). Working class interests include those thrown out of economic life as a result of ‘down sizing/streamlining in order to make us internationally competative’. If the ANC had any semblance of working class interest, it would lead the civic struggles in townships on evictions and electricity cut-offs, it would spearhead campaigns by social movements for affordable food prices. It won’t, for it has become a ‘respectable’ government party…well, I’m not carried away by this language – it simply means the ANC has become anti-working class (for that is what bourgeois means in its essential policical orientation).
@ Steven ….thank you.
A couple of points:
1/ You refer to the nationalisation of the cement industry. Given the record of the ANC in running the usual delivery platforms I have absolutely no confidence in their ability to run any element of the private sector.
2/ I see no advantage to any form of wealth tax but would advocate far more effective use of existing tax receipts. Existing revenue collections are substantial but they are being squandered on a massive scale
3/ You say that nothing stands to the left of the ANC. I will risk provoking howls of protest when I say that the DA may well have more genuine concern for the plight of the poor than does the ruling party. The ANC knows this and as a result they work very hard to demonise Helen Zille
anton kleinschmidt,
re: your request for unbiased history.
Maybe the following article is just about as unbiased account as one could possibly get. Its written by BOTH Jews and Arabs who are trying to find a peaceful solution in the Middle East.
http://www.mideastweb.org/palpop.htm
Population of Ottoman and Mandate Palestine: Statistical and Demographic Considerations
Wikipedia normally has good stuff, and when Wikipedia articles are disputed, people are welcome to point out perceived biasses/distortions which are stated upfront in the article (these are inserted by the Wikipedia editors).
Here is a Wikipedia article that goes back all the way to the Neolithic Period 8500–4300 BCE.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Palestine
@ Oldfox ….. thank you
Oldfox, Steven, Anton
A new organisation was started by SA Muslims about 2 years ago to do interfaith work in SA. They are being interviewed on SAFM on Sunday night on Faith-to-Faith. You might like to listen.
Sorry – forgot to say that the interview is at 7pm. You can also phone in with questions.
Anyone’s views on the bombing of the UN HQ and a few hotels which are being utilised solely for Media crews?
Two quotes: “we can forgive the arab people for killing our children, but we cannot forgive them for making us kill their children” and
“When they start loving their own people as much as they hate the jews/israeli’s, then there will be peace”