In the latest example of the sensational anti-Semitism of the International Marxist Tendency, we have the organisation’s take on the crisis currently gripping the country. The author of the article is a member of the German section. Funny that, you would think a German would know better.
The article begins thus:
The Israeli bombing of Gaza has already killed at least 48 Palestinians – among whom 14 are children – and injured hundreds, while six Israelis have been killed by rockets fired from the Gaza Strip. The international media has once again presented the bombings as a legitimate retaliation against Hamas’ decision to fire rockets into Israel. However, as usual, they give a completely one-sided view of the real causes of this escalation of the crisis in Israel and Palestine.
There is no mention of the fact that the Islamofascist terror group, Hamas, deliberately places its weapons in civilian areas to maximise casualties, or that the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) do all they can to limit casualties, including warning residents in advance to evacuate the area. We are also given the laughable statement that the international media exhibits a pro-Israel bias.
The ignoramus who wrote the article writes off the Abraham Accords:
Were we to believe Jared Kushner – Senior Advisor on the Middle East and son-in-law to former US president Donald Trump – what we are seeing in Israel and Palestine isn’t even happening. In a typical display of arrogance, Kushner last month wrote in the Wall Street Journal, “We are witnessing the last vestiges of what has been known as the Arab-Israeli conflict.”
But the whole point of the Abraham Accords was to bypass the whole question of Israel-Palestine. Decades of foreign policy has been based on the idea that for Israel to have relations with the Arab countries in the region, it has to reach an accommodation with the Palestinians. This has since been shown to be false. No such accommodation was necessary for Israel to reach a breakthrough in its relations with Sudan, Bahrain, the UAE and Saudi Arabia, all of whom have now normalised ties with that country. Leftists are disgusted that these countries, long-standing enemies of Israel and Jewry, are now choosing to turn their swords into ploughshares and embrace their ancient foe. Funny that. You would think these pro-peace leftists would welcome it, but the opposite is true. It is almost as if they want the whole region to remain in a permanent state of war with Israel.
What we are seeing is yet another escalation of violence against the Palestinian population by the Israeli state. This is the poisoned result of attempts to impose an imperialist “peace” strong-armed by US imperialism, on the basis of suppressing the rights of the Palestinian majority. This policy was relentlessly pursued by Trump: with the US recognition of Jerusalem as the undivided capital of Israel; Netanyahu’s constitutional law declaring Israel a Jewish state; Israel’s territorial claim over the Golan Heights, and culminating with the signing of the so-called “Abraham Accords”.
In other words, the reason for the violence is not the Islamofascist campaign by Hamas and its Palestinian supporters to wipe the Jews off the face of the earth. Oh no. It is all the fault of the evil U.S. imperialists who support Israel and got the Arab countries to turn their backs on the rejectionist irredentism of the Palestinians to embrace peace.
We have the usual claims about Israel being an ‘apartheid state’:
Double standards have been applied in systematically discriminating against the Palestinian population living within Israel, let alone those living in the territories of the Palestinian authority or East Jerusalem. Here, the Israeli state is in fact an occupying power, with tight control over roads, water, telecommunications, energy, and all sorts of supplies: now including the lifeline of COVID-19 vaccines supplies.
Interestingly, the article makes no mention of the fact that Israel offered the Palestinians help in securing Covid-19 vaccines, only for the Palestinian Authority to refuse all cooperation. Mr. Rieger is spreading blood libels about Israel, repeating the pernicious lie that the reason why Palestine has struggled to attain Covid-19 vaccines is the nefarious behaviour of the Israeli state.
Nor is there any mention of the fact that Hamas and its allies have been involved in smuggling weaponry into the enclave to use against Israel, and has a history of sending suicide bombers into the country, and that without the blockades Israel currently has in place, Hamas would be even freer to import all sorts of murderous implements for the purpose of Jew murder, and send its agents into Israel to kill and maim.
In recent months, we have seen a rising wave of struggles against evictions, demolitions, land expropriations and the daily anti-Palestinian provocations of the settlers, and the Zionist extreme right wing.
The militancy displayed by the youth in Gaza last year, with thousands defying the bullets of Israeli snipers for weeks on end, should serve as a warning: repression will not achieve anything other than an even-more determined resistance.
This grotesque ‘article’ celebrates the useless ‘martyrdom’ of young Palestinians at the hands of the Israeli forces, and eggs it on. What is this but an incitement to Jew-murder? When the IMT says ‘resistance’, we all know exactly what it means – it supports violent, militant attacks against the Israeli state, its agents and its supporters, who are overwhelmingly of a certain ethnicity. No matter how hard it tries to wriggle away from it, the fact remains that the IMT is inciting the murder of Jews defending their homeland from Islamofascist terror. The International Marxist Tendency is therefore an anti-Semitic organisation. No ifs, no buts.
The lie of ‘ethnic cleansing’ is repeated:
For weeks, aggression against Palestinian rights has escalated in a series of high-profile cases. In an attempt to further cleanse East Jerusalem of its Palestinian residents and replace them with Jewish settlers, the Israeli army and police forced through the stealing of a dozen Palestinian families’ homes by Jewish settlers in the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood.
What these Jew-hating cultists do not mention is that the Sheikh Jarrah homes in question are legally owned by Jews. The land was bought in the 19th century by Jewish settlers, it was lost in the 1948 war to Jordan (which settled Arab families in place of the Jews, who were ethnically cleansed) and was retaken by Israel in 1967. Israel magnanimously allowed the Arab families living there and in other parts of Eastern Jerusalem to remain in residence, on the condition they paid rent to their Jewish owners. The residents of Sheikh Jarrah have spent the last several decades refusing to do this. The owners have been working through the courts for many years to deal with this controversy, an indication of how complex the situation is and how determined the Israeli state is to make sure it is handled fairly.
The Israeli police’s decision to bar Palestinians from gathering in front of the Damascus Gate in East Jerusalem, a common gathering spot for the city’s Palestinian residents, especially during Ramadan, was a further provocation. No explanation was given. Palestinians saw it for what it was: another attempt to take a central spot in the city away from them. Further initially peaceful protests were again met with gratuitous violence by the Israeli state.
As any Israeli could tell you, riots in East Jerusalem during this time of year are a pretty regular occurrence. Barring Palestinians from gathering in front of the Damascus Gate was an understandable response to the rioting and mayhem that been going on these past few weeks. Here is what the Times of Israel had to say about it:
In a phone call with The Times of Israel, a Jerusalem police spokesperson argued that cordoning off the area was actually intended as a means of riot control.
“There are always riots. Now, they’re just using the barriers as an excuse. So if there weren’t barriers, what would we have then?” the spokesperson said.
There have been clashes for weeks now between Jews and Arabs. A TikTok challenge which has gone viral sees Palestinians filming themselves slapping ultra-Orthodox Jews. Likewise, a minority of far-right Kahanist loons, who are condemned by most Israelis, have gone out of their way to attack and assault Arabs. To suggest that the actions of this extremist minority represent the Israeli people as a whole is disingenuous anti-Semitic propaganda. Lenin and Trotsky, who are heroes to the scoundrels that run the IMT, reacted for more harshly to far lesser disturbances than what is being done now by the rioting Palestinian thugs However, the Damascus Gate incident is now framed by the IMT as a ‘provocation’ which legitimises Palestinian thuggery and violence.
The actions by the police and army were a conscious escalation of aggression on the part of Israel. Israeli authorities escalated the situation even further by storming the Temple Mount (Haram al-Sharif) and the Al Aqsa mosque situated on it, the third-most holy site in Islam. Tear gas granades were shot inside the mosque and unarmed Palestinian Muslims, who had come to pray, were attacked by Israeli forces. Throwing stones was their only means of response against the heavily armed and well protected Israeli soldiers.
What this disgraceful rag does not mention is that Palestinians in Al Aqsa mosque had been storing stones and other projectiles in their place of worship, using it as a base for assaults on Israeli security forces in the area. Tear gas was aimed at the stone-throwing Palestinians outside the mosque, and some tear gas inevitably ended up inside the mosque due to the worshippers leaving the doors wide open. The myth of ‘peaceful Palestinian worshippers’ is apparently to anyone who has looked into the matter.
The Temple Mount area has always been the focal point of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in Jerusalem, and the Israeli authorities knew very well what they were doing when they let their troops storm Al Aqsa during Ramadan without any justifiable reason. They knew perfectly well that Hamas would respond, especially given the move’s religious implications.
There was a very justifiable reason for Israeli police forces to intervene – the rioting and stone-throwing mobs that were congregating in the area. So keen were the Israelis to defuse tensions that they even diverted a procession meant to celebrate Jerusalem Day (the reunification of East Jerusalem with the rest of Israel in 1967) from the area. The idea that the Jews ‘provoke’ their own murderers is an age-old anti-Semitic trope. As for Hamas, if they really cared about their holy places, why would they launch rockets at them?
The Israeli army claims it would only attack terrorists and Hamas targets. But the truth of the matter is that – even if we trust their intentions – that would simply be impossible. Gaza is densely populated by two million people living on a 360 square kilometers strip of land. Civilians have nowhere to escape. While Israeli citizens can flee to bunkers, and modern residential buildings in Israel are built to make them resilient against rocket attacks, Palestinians in Gaza have no such protections, thanks to the economic blockade imposed on the strip by Israel, which includes a ban on building materials. While most of the rockets fired on Israel are stopped by the Iron Dome air defence system, Gazans possess no such defenses.
So what is the solution for the IMT? Should the Israelis simply allow the odd rocket to kill an Israeli every now and then, and not retaliate? The logic is of such a stupendous idiocy, and the conclusion arrived at so singularly cretinous and malicious, that it is almost impossible to put into words.
The suffering of Palestinians is blamed on Israel:
All this piles on top of the tremendous suffering of ‘normal’ times: the blockade and the high population density make it impossible to develop an economy in Gaza. A 50 percent joblessness rate is the result. Due to the economic blockade, there is a lack of the most essential things like healthcare and sufficient food.
Yet there is such a simple, easy solution. It is for Palestinians to recognise Israel’s right to exist. Then they can have their own state and live peacefully, side by side, with their former foes. Gaza and the West Bank would flourish. But no. They must have war, endless war. And more and more Palestinians will die as a result.
US and EU politicians responded to the escalation by condemning “violence on both sides”. This is utter hypocrisy. The conflict is completely asymmetrical. On the one side we have Israel, the strongest military power of the Middle East and a developed capitalist country. On the other side we have an oppressed people, under occupation, without a state or a military, whose homes are taken away or bombed.
Although Hamas’ rocket attacks are certainly traumatic for Israeli civilians, most of these rockets are primitive, self-made glorified fireworks with little range or detonation power. Their main use for Hamas is propagandistic. According to the Israeli Army, 90 percent of these rockets are stopped by the Iron Dome air defence system.
Hamas’ rockets are not designed to harm Israel, nor to fight the occupation. Like Netanyahu, Hamas is trying to claw back the shreds of its long worn-out legitimacy, by posing as the paladin of the Palestinian national struggle. In fact, the authority of Hamas – as well as that of the corrupt Palestinian leadership of Abbas and Fatah – has been increasingly undermined by the spontaneous mobilisation of the Palestinian youth: the source of mass resistance and struggle both in the Palestinian Authority and inside Israel.
There is some truly incredible sophistry at work here. We are meant to believe that because Israel is more militarily powerful and prosperous, it is automatically the bad guy, whilst the Palestinians are the righteous victims. You see, in the past, Jews were poor and persecuted victims of society, but now, Jews are wealthy and strong, so they are now evil according to Marxist logic. This is a classic example of what Friedrich Nietzsche called ‘slave morality’. According to this warped worldview (which ironically Nietzsche blames on the Judaeo-Christian religion), to be weak, poor and unfortunate makes you good, and to be strong, self-confident, prosperous and lacking in self-reproach is to be evil. Today’s Jews are no longer content to be victims, but are determined to flourish in the face of their murderous enemies. Meanwhile, the Palestinians hoodwink the world into believing that because they are poor, suffering and unhappy (largely as a result of their own actions), they represent the forces of good.
The article talks of ‘occupation’. First of all, it is best to use the term ‘disputed’ for the territories of the West Bank and Gaza. Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, and, with the exception of ground incursions every now and then, Israel has been content to let the Gazans stew in their own Islamofascist hatred. It has no desire to recover the territory. As for the West Bank, it is impossible for Israel to give up the whole territory to an independent Palestine without seriously compromising its security. Israel never planned on taking either Gaza or the West Bank – they were meant to be part of a Palestinian state, but the Arabs rejected the partition plan of 1948 and chose war. The result was that Jordan and Egypt seized the West Bank and Gaza respectively. Israel took them in the 1967 war, but could never figure out what exactly to do with them. Making them part of Israel would make the Arabs the majority and destroy the Jewish character of the state – and we all know what that would have entailed. On the other hand, neither Egypt or Jordan was willing to accept them back in exchange for peace – the King of Jordan in particular not wanting the poisoned chalice of restless and hostile Palestinians in his territory, especially not after Black September. Jordan even went as far as to strip the West Bankers of their Jordanian citizenship, leaving them stateless to this very day. For years, Israeli politicians were dead against an independent, third state between the Mediterranean and the River Jordan, fearing it would become a base for terror. The Palestinians have said that they will never recognise Israel, meaning they won’t get a state for the foreseeable future. Moreover, a good chunk of the West Bank will have to be annexed to Israel if it is to have defensible borders. To bring up the question of settlements is a red herring – there are nowhere near as many settlements or settlers in the West Bank as people believe, and even if there were none, the Palestinians would be no more inclined to peace.
The article laughably asserts that Hamas rockets are not meant to harm Israel. What are they for then, a fireworks’ display? Of course they are meant to harm Israel. They are meant to intimidate the Israeli population, kill the odd Jew, and cause turmoil and confusion within the country. That this also enables Hamas to emerge as the champion of the Palestinian cause is an added bonus, but don’t for one minute believe that they don’t enjoy killing Jews and revel in the bloodshed they are causing. As if their actions would be any less repulsive if they didn’t enjoy killing Jews!
The Israeli youth and working class must understand that the occupation and oppression of the Palestinians is not in their interest. The occupation is a tool used by the Israeli ruling class to divide the working class of the region and play them off against each other. Zionism and fear mongering over the Palestinians is used by the Israeli capitalists to blur the divisions between Jewish workers and capitalists, suggesting that they have the shared interests, which is utterly false.
The IMT pushes the false idea, as do all Marxists, that there is a ‘class division’ within Jewry which cuts across feelings of ethnic solidarity. This is quite simply nonsense. In all cases in history, we have found that national and ethnic ties cut across class divisions. They always have and they always will. Marxists, with their one-sided obsession with ‘class conflict’, cannot bring themselves to understand this. Saying ‘We don’t have a problem with Jews, just wealthy Jews’ does not make you any less of an anti-Semite. The Marxist position is that Jews are only worthy of sympathy and solidarity when they are victims, or make an effort to fight ‘oppression’, however nebulously defined. Once they become wealthy or powerful, however, they are suddenly part of an evil Jewish-Zionist bourgeoisie that is responsible for all the world’s evils. Jews who in any way show support for Israel or cling strongly to their Jewish identity are dismissed as pawns of the Zionist bourgeoisie, even if they are working-class – again demonstrating how impossible it is in practice to make the false distinction between poor, persecuted Jewish workers and evil Jewish capitalists. The Nazis sent both Jewish workers and capitalists to the gas chambers, and did not distinguish between the two. Anyone who looks at the history of Israel can see that one cannot make this simplistic division – Jewish capitalists like the Rothschilds helped Jewish peasants and workers to migrate to Palestine from Europe. They did not do so hoping for financial reward, but for reasons of ethnic solidarity and philanthropy. The Israeli Labour Party governed Israel for most of its history, and was hardly the pawn of capitalist interests. Across the word, Jews, whether rich or poor, are united in their support for Israel, and within Israel itself, the Jewish people are determined to preserve their state and their exercise their right to self-determination, not because they have been brainwashed by the evil capitalists against their interests, but because the long, painful history of their people has taught them that their best interests are served by having a state of their own. Meanwhile, Marxist regimes have brutally oppressed Jewish people.
The only way forward for the mass of Jewish and Palestinian workers and youth in Israel and Palestine is the revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist Israeli state and the occupation that goes with it, and the establishment of a socialist federation of the Middle East.
That can only be achieved by proletarian internationalism and class unity. But in order to achieve class unity, the Israeli working class and youth must acknowledge the right of the Palestinian masses to national self-determination, and support their current struggle against the occupation.
Infantile nonsense. There can be no united ‘class struggle’ between Israelis on the one hand, and people who want to drive them into the sea on the other. The two are quite simply incompatible. Palestinians must accept Israel’s right to exist as a prerequisite for having their own state. Until that happens, this conflict will never end,.