Last Sunday, September 1, 2024, the Zionist trade union center Histadrut, which represents 800,000 workers, called a general strike for September 2. The general strike paralyzed several sectors of transportation, education, hospitals, banks and public services. However, the judiciary decided to end the strike, which was complied with by the union leaders, who are not only Zionists but also servants of the bosses.
By Fabio Bosco
The strike was preceded by a large mobilization that gathered between 500,000 and 700,000 demonstrators the day before.
But Sunday’s strike and mobilization did not have among its demands an end to the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, nor an end to the genocidal actions of Israeli forces and Zionist settlers in the West Bank, nor an end to the military attacks on Lebanon.
The main issue is the Israelis detained by the Palestinian resistance in Gaza. On Saturday, the Israeli army recovered the bodies of six Israeli prisoners who died two or three days ago in the midst of the Israeli offensive in Gaza.
The Israeli government claims that Hamas executed the six prisoners. Hamas claims that it was the Israeli military offensive that was responsible for the deaths.
The fact is that these deaths changed Israeli Jewish public opinion.
Until then, most Jewish Israelis supported the genocidal attacks in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon. At the same time, they demanded the release of Israeli prisoners held in Gaza.
Following the recovery of the bodies of the six Israelis, the Israeli Jewish population understood that the continuation of the genocide in Gaza involves the death of nearly 100 Israeli prisoners. Moreover, the majority also concluded that the unpopular Prime Minister Netanyahu wants to maintain the genocide in order to stay in power, disregarding the wish of the prisoners’ families, who want to have them back, alive.
Opinion polls show that 53% of Israelis support a ceasefire and prisoner exchange, with the withdrawal of troops from the entire Gaza Strip. It is clear that the support of half of the Israelis for the ceasefire in Gaza does not imply the end of the genocidal offensive against the Palestinians in the West Bank, nor does it exclude a broad military offensive against Lebanon, much less the end of apartheid and ethnic cleansing that has lasted 76 years.
Netanyahu against the cease-fire
On the same day of the general strike, Netanyahu made public his opposition to the cease-fire agreement voted by the UN Security Council three months ago. The agreement presented by the United States and voted on by the Security Council foresees the exchange of prisoners and the total withdrawal of Israeli troops from Gaza in three phases of six weeks each.
Netanyahu wants to keep Israeli troops in at least two areas of Gaza: the Philadelphi and Netzarim corridors, opening space for the expulsion of Palestinians and the establishment of Zionist colonies in Gaza.
Netanyahu’s real goal is to expand the colonization of Palestinian land in Gaza and the West Bank in order to regain his support base among the Israeli Jewish population, which ranges between 22% and 33%, and to save his discredited government.
Hezbollah and Iran abandon the Palestinian resistance
The leaders of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, and of the Iranian regime, Ayatollah Khamenei, have stated several times that, despite their solidarity with the suffering Palestinian people, they will not attack Israel because of the genocide in Gaza. The only Arab force promoting active solidarity is the Yemeni Houthis, who have blockaded shipping in the Red Sea in support of the Palestinians.
In the face of the assassinations of Hezbollah leader Fuad Shukr in Beirut and Palestinian leader Ismail Hanieh in Tehran in late July, both Nasrallah and Khamenei promised a forceful response to Zionist crimes.
However, on August 13, Iranian officials stated that they would await cease-fire negotiations in Gaza and might even reduce the scope of retaliation if Israel agreed to a cease-fire. On August 27, Ayatollah Khamenei declared in a meeting with the newly installed government of President Masoud Pezeshkian that Iran should be open to negotiating a new nuclear deal with U.S. imperialism in exchange for an end to sanctions.
On the northern border, 100 Israeli aircraft attacked 400 targets in southern Lebanon in the early hours of August 25. Hezbollah then launched several missiles and drones against northern 1948-occupied Palestine. After these intense mutual attacks, both the Zionists and Hezbollah leaders claimed to have achieved their objectives, and mutual attacks have since returned to low intensity.
Active Palestinian resistance
In Gaza, the Palestinian resistance has continued carrying out, within its limited capacity, attacks, self-defense, and sabotage against Israeli troops. This is all occuringin a context characterized by wide military inequality, casualties among the Zionist troops, and also the high economic cost of the war, which already amounts to about $68 billion according to Zionist Finance Minister Belazel Smotrich.
In the West Bank, Israeli forces launched a series of large-scale genocidal attacks on Palestinian cities and refugee camps in Jenin, Tulkarm, Tubas and Nablus on August 28. Palestinian youth are resorting to self-defense, with some weapons taken from Palestinian police forces and purchased from Israeli smugglers. Contrary to the Zionist narrative that they are armed Hamas and Islamic Jihad groups, most of these youths flout their organizations and turn to self-defense. Several cases demonstrate this, such as that of Mohannad al-Asood, a former member of Fatah and the Palestinian police, or that of young Wael Mishah and Tariq Daoud, from Nablus.
It is necessary to resume the mobilizations of solidarity with Palestine throughout the world, particularly in Europe and the United States, after the end of the summer vacation period.
Why is the Israeli proletariat not an ally of the Palestinian cause?
All over the world, the working class and the youth are mobilizing in solidarity with Palestine. However, there are no mobilizations for the end of the genocide in Gaza by the Israeli Jewish proletariat.
This has not happen out of ignorance. Every Israeli is aware of the situation of genocide in Gaza, of the criminal Zionist actions in the West Bank, of the military attacks on Lebanon and of the situation of apartheid and ethnic cleansing imposed on the Palestinians for 76 years. But the vast majority of the proletariat supports these crimes under the false narrative of “Israel’s right to defend itself” and the “fight against terrorism”. Why has this dehumanization occurred?
The Israeli Jewish proletariat has had economic and political privileges relative to the Palestinian proletariat since the beginning of Zionist colonization over a hundred years ago. In other words, Zionist colonization transformed the Jewish proletariat into the agent and beneficiary of the theft of land, homes, and jobs from the Palestinian people.
It is clear that there is a class struggle between the Israeli bourgeoisie and proletariat. But these conflicts are subordinate to the maintenance of the colonial order against the Palestinians.
That is why an alliance between the Jewish and Palestinian proletariats for the end of genocide and for the liberation of Palestine is impossible. In occupied Palestine there is a small number of anti-Zionist Jews. These are true allies of the Palestinian people.
This is the same colonial situation that occurred in Algeria. The “pied-noir” proletariat of French origin was, together with the French army, the pillar of the colonialist advance. A war of the Algerian proletariat and peasantry was necessary to expel the French colonizers.
To conquer free Palestine, from the river to the sea, it is necessary to put an end to the State of Israel. In this way, the Palestinian people will be able to decide their destiny in freedom. And those who accept to live in peace with the Palestinians will be able to live in Palestine, as Palestine was before the Zionist colonization, when Muslim, Christian and Jewish children played together, without labels.
IV International
The first revolutionary militants in Palestine were confronted with the question of the Jewish proletariat originating from the Zionist colonization. The first Palestinian Trotskyist organization was the Revolutionary Communist League (RCL) led by Tony Cliff (Yigael Gluckstein) and formed in the 1930s.
The RCL’s political orientation was, in Tony Cliff’s words, “Arab workers should fight against Zionism and imperialism, and break with the reactionary Arab leaders. And the Jewish workers should join the Arab masses in this struggle.”
The RCL had no illusions about Zionist colonization. On the contrary, it opposed Jewish immigration to Palestine because this immigration placed European Jewish refugees at the service of the Zionist colonization machine against the Palestinian population. They advocated opening the borders of the United Kingdom and the United States to Jewish immigration, preferred destinations for Jewish refugees, as an alternative to Palestine. From their own experience, they were familiar with the “left-wing” Zionist organizations and the kibbutz (collective farms for Jewish settlers), and knew that they did not represent any kind of socialist experiment. On the contrary, they were the spearhead for the colonization of Arab lands and for the expulsion of the Palestinian population.
Consistent with that position, the RCL opposed the partition of Palestine in 1947 and the formation of the State of Israel in 1948, unlike the Communist Party which, following Stalin’s position, supported partition and the Nakba.
But the RCL made a wrong assessment of the role of the social classes in the struggle for the liberation of Palestine and the entire Arab East. They advocated an alliance between the Palestinian working class and the Jewish working class to confront imperialism, Zionism and the reactionary Arab elites. But this alliance was impossible because of the exclusionary colonialist nature of the Zionist advance.
Tony Cliff himself recognized this issue in his biography: “Of course there was class conflict within the Jewish community in Palestine. Workers and capitalists fought over wages and conditions. But Zionist colonial expansion dulled the class struggle and prevented it from assuming the political form of opposition to Zionism and imperialism, and solidarity with the exploited and oppressed Arabs.”
Not understanding national oppression in all its consequences for the class struggle, and being implanted mainly in the Jewish working class, the RCL had many difficulties in developing. Despite publishing a magazine in Arabic, another in Hebrew, and also leaflets in English for the British troops, the RCL counted almost 30 militants in 1946, of whom only seven were Arabs.
