LOOKING AT PALESTINE
ARTICLE BY EVAN REID MINNITI
For nearly two years, with the complicity of Presidents Biden and Trump, Israel has carried out a genocide against the Palestinian population of Gaza. Daily air strikes pepper a densely populated region whose history predates any Abrahamic religion, collapsing societal infrastructure for more than two million people. All aid that goes in or out of Gaza is tightly controlled by the misnamed Israeli “Defense” Force (IDF). The official death toll in Gaza has already surpassed 62,000. But this is likely a conservative estimate. In July of 2024, the Lancet (the oldest medical journal in the world) published an article estimating that many more Gazans would die from disease and malnutrition caused by Israel’s barbaric siege. This prediction is coming to bitter fruition as Gaza looks down the barrel of famine. Simultaneously, Israeli settlers (with military support) have seized on the opportunity to intensify an already decades-long process of stealing thousands of acres of land at gunpoint from Palestinian peasants in the West Bank.
This genocide is not an aberration but the logical end result of the Zionist project. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is only a complicated issue in the sense that the history of any region over the course of more than a century necessarily contains many facts, figures, dates, statistics, etc. Far too many for any short article to do them justice. But what is plain to see for anyone willing to do even a modicum of research into the conflict is that the Zionist movement, with the support of Western Imperialism, has waged a one sided colonial war of dispossession against the Palestinians since well before 1948.
Zionism arose in the late 19th and early 20th century amongst Jewish intelligentsia in Europe. Theodor Herzyl, whose framed portrait still hung up in the offices of the New York Times as of 2020, proposed in his 1895 book “The Jewish State”, that Jews immigrate to Palestine to establish an independent society. Herzl’s proposed Jewish state was described in colonial rhetoric as “an outpost of European civilization against Asian barbarism.” Two years later, Herzl and others formed the World Zionist Organization whose stated purpose was to found a Jewish state in Palestine. They would find enthusiastic allies amongst antisemitic reactionaries eager to exile the Jewish people far away.
From the get-go the early Zionists appealed to various colonial powers for assistance, notably getting the official support of the British Empire in the 1917 Balfour Declaration. The early Zionists never thought of themselves as anything less than a colonial movement competing against the native Arab majority in Palestine, a far cry from modern liberals who bend themselves backwards to prove Israel’s “progressive” credentials.
Palestine, then part of the Ottoman Empire, had a diverse religious and ethnic population largely employed as peasant farmers and agricultural wage laborers. Contrary to a famous Zionist slogan, this was very much a land with a people. Though predominantly Arab and Sunni Muslim, Palestine was home to protected minorities including Christians, Jews, Druze, Assyrians, Armenians, and even small sects like Samaritans and Mandaeans. Non-Islamic Abrahamic religions had been respected by Muslim authorities since the time of the Prophet Muhammad as “peoples of the book”. Sephardic Jews expelled from Iberia in the late 15th Century by Catholic monarchs had found a home in Palestine.
Looking at the social climate in Europe, it was understandable that some people would support Zionism. In France, vile antisemitism surfaced during the Dreyfuss Affair when a Jewish military officer was falsely accused of treason. In Tsarist Russia, Jews were forced to live in the Pale of Settlement (including territory in modern-day Ukraine, Poland, Belarus, Lithuania, and Moldova). With the full complicity of the Tsar and Orthodox Church, local landlords whipped up pogroms against Jews to divert potential peasant uprisings. Jewish villages were plundered by mislead gentile peasants who subjected their Jewish neighbors to beatings, rapes, and even murder.
Despite these horrific conditions, Zionism remained a minority opinion for most Jews. Zionism was seen as impractical and its inherently colonialist nature rejected by many. This is reflected in Jewish immigration statistics. Between 1881 and 1924, two and a half million European Jews immigrated to the United States; in that same period, only around one hundred thousand immigrated to Palestine in the first and second aliyahs (immigration waves to Palestine organized by Zionists).
Many Jews were much more attracted to Marxism and the workers movement than to Zionism. They saw the class struggle and the fight against antisemitism to be one and the same. Important revolutionaries like Leon Trotsky, Rosa Luxemburg, and the Bundists were recruited from the ranks of oppressed Jewish society. All of them explicitly rejected Zionism, with Trotsky going so far as to call Zionism a “mockery of the Jewish people” that was preparing a bloody trap of sectarian violence. Revolution spread like wildfire across Europe following World War One. The Russian Revolution of 1917 (co-lead by Trotsky) established the Soviet Republic which worked to uproot antisemitism from Russian society. Fearing the spectre of the Russian Revolution, European capitalists funded the fascist counterrevolutions amongst the middle classes to crush the labor movement.
Hitler, coming to power via this process, unleashed a world-historic tidal wave of counterrevolutionary violence culminating in the Second World War and the Holocaust. The systematic extermination of six million Jews (as well as millions of Soviet POWs, Poles, Romani, and others) in the Nazi’s apocalyptic camps was the tipping point that made Zionism attractive to a majority of Jewish people around the world. Hundreds of thousands of Jews fled Europe. Denied access to the United States by Roosevelt, many attempted to flee to Palestine where they would be cynically used as pawns by the Zionist leaders in their struggle against the Palestinian natives.
Photo by Mohammed Ibrahim
Despite the barbarism of the Holocaust, Zionism’s inherent nature as a reactionary, colonial movement intrinsically tied with imperialism remained unaltered. British Imperialism ruled Palestine as a de facto colony following World War One and wanted to use Zionism as a divide-and-rule tactic to split Palestine’s population between its native Muslim majority and the growing Jewish immigrant community. Notable examples of class solidarity across ethnic/religious divisions such as the Nesher cement factory strike in 1925 or the early Palestinian-Jewish unity efforts of the young Palestine Communist Party were squandered by the zig-zagging policies imposed by Stalin on Palestine’s Communists.
Ugly ethnic clashes boiled over throughout the 1920s and 1930s as the Zionists worked to displace Palestinians from their jobs and farms. Tensions arose between the British and the Zionists as to who was the dog and who was the tail following the failed Palestinian uprising in 1936-1939. Zionist terrorists killed dozens of civilians (including Jews) when they assassinated British officials in the King David hotel bombing. A de facto civil war enveloped the region between the British, the Zionists, and the Palestinians.
Following World War Two, US Imperialism energetically sponsored the Zionist project as weakened British Imperialism fled from the mess they had created. The newly-established United Nations set forth plans for a partition of Palestine between Jewish and Arab portions. Sensing an opportunity from shifting international alliances, the Zionist militias waged an offensive against Palestinian villages starting in 1947. Zionist militiamen attacked largely undefended villages, often after nightfall. In urban centers, bombs exploded in Palestinian neighborhoods. Every Zionist faction from “left” to right participated: the “socialist” Palmach, the rightwing Irgun, the fascist-sympathetic Lehi, and others. Brutal massacres were committed by the Zionists at Deir Yassin, Tantura, Lyda and Ramle, and many other places. Word spread and hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled in terror. Under pressure from the outraged masses, neighboring nations like Jordan and Egypt invaded but were soon repulsed by the better armed and internationally supported Zionists.
It is undeniable that elements amongst the Palestinian population responded with their own terrorism and that Jewish civilians were brutally killed in sectarian violence. These were desperate acts committed by colonized people facing population transfer at gunpoint. The violence of the oppressed can never be equated to the violence of the oppressor. The Zionists seemed to have somewhat consciously incited anti-Jewish violence. As recounted by Israeli historian Ilan Pappe in his book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, on Dec. 30, 1947 Irgun terrorists threw explosives into a crowd of Palestinian oil workers which killed six. In the ensuing chaos, surviving oil workers murdered their Jewish coworkers. This in turn was “avenged” by a massacre of Palestinians at Balad al-Shaykh.
The State of Israel was founded with machine guns and hand grenades against largely defenseless peasant farmers. Heroes of Israeli politics like David Ben-Gurion, Golda Meir, and Menachem Begin were all complicit in the sectarian violence. Thousands of unarmed Palestinians were massacred by the Zionist paramilitaries. Between 711,000 and 870,000 Palestinians were thrown off their land by Zionist violence, fleeing to Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, Egypt, and other nations. Palestinians were ostensibly allowed to keep the West Bank and the Gaza Strip but soon found themselves under the thumb of nearby Jordan and Egypt respectively. This was the start of the Nakba, the catastrophic defeat the Palestinian people have attempted to reverse ever since. A minority population of Palestinians lived within the borders of the new Israeli state and today make up around a fifth of the population of Israel. Different Zionist governments have juggled between segregation and integration for Palestinians in Israel, but they nevertheless remain an exploited and discriminated against minority within Israeli society.
Antisemitic persecution was largely absent from the Arab World prior to 1948. Where it did exist, it in no way resembled the size and ferocity of what had been occurring in Europe for centuries. Following the Nakba, antisemitic attitudes festered in many Middle Eastern countries and ancient Jewish communities were depopulated as many fled to Israel or abroad. Despite their claims about making the world safer for Jews, the Zionists effectively severed ancient connections between Middle Eastern Jews and their neighbors. And these predominantly Mizrahi Jews from the Arab world face widespread discrimination in Israeli society.
In the decades following 1948, the Palestinian people began to regather their strength. In a world climate characterized by giant anti-colonial revolutions across Africa, Asia, and Latin America, thousands of young Palestinian men and women flocked to leftwing anti-imperialist armed groups in the late 1960s. Motivated by the examples of Cuba, Algeria, and Vietnam, these fedayeen waged relentless guerilla attacks against Israel and became embroiled in civil wars in Jordan and Lebanon. Yasser Arafat and the Fatah movement were catapulted to leadership following their hardwon victory over Israeli forces at the 1968 Battle of Karameh in Jordan. Other fedayeen groups, like the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and the breakaway Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP), defined themselves as Marxist-Leninists and saw the Palestinian struggle as part of the world revolution. The fedayeen generally saw themselves as fighting for a secular, democratic state that would give equal rights to Palestinians and Jews.
Nevertheless, the fedayeen faced a decisive defeat in the Lebanese Civil War in 1982. Lebanon, which became home to hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees, was the site of a dramatic conflict between rightwing Christian elements associated with the country’s ruling class and a multi-ethnic, secular front amongst Lebanon’s workers and peasants who the Palestinians allied with. Described by a contemporary British journalist as starting as essentially a class revolution, the Lebanese Civil War devolved along sectarian lines. Israel invaded on more than one occasion to assist the Christian rightwing, whose vanguard were a Hitler-inspired formation called the Phalangists. Encircled by their enemies, Arafat and the fedayeen surrendered and were exiled to Tunisia. The Palestinian refugees in Beirut then faced a brutal massacre by Phalangists at Sabra and Shatilla, overseen by future Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and portrayed in an uncharacteristically honest Israeli film, Waltz with Bashir.
The defeat of the guerillas in Lebanon laid the seeds for a mass uprising of the Palestinian masses inside Gaza and the West Bank. Trotsky defined a revolution as the moment when the masses consciously enter the stage of history to decide their own destiny. With this definition in mind we see that the First Intidada was nothing less than a revolutionary effort by the Palestinian people to throw off the yoke of Israeli colonialism and reach some sort of new settlement with the Israeli people.
Much hullabaloo has been made about the Intifada and popular slogans associated with it. We are told endlessly by politicians from both parties, from TV commentators, from fingerwagging employers or university administrators, and increasingly from law enforcement agents that the Intifada is a call for a violence against Jews. This is a disgusting lie, perpetrated by the various authorities of the capitalist system who are terrified by the Intifada’s revolutionary content.
Photo by Emad El Byed
Tinder had accumulated for decades. Following the 1967 War, Gaza and the West Bank were under an Israeli military occupation. The traditional agrarian economy was eroded by Israeli capitalism. Settlers seized the best land and water supplies with the support of the Likud Party (Benjamin Netanyahu’s party today), defended by the Israeli military. More and more Palestinians were proletarianized as wage laborers, often for Israeli companies. Very few opportunities existed for pursuing higher education or well-paid jobs. The defeat of the fedayeen weighed heavy on people’s minds. A protest occurred in 1986 at Birzeit University. Though small in size, this was a canary in the coal mine for a social explosion which would finally arrive on December 7, 1987.
After decades of dispossession, occupation, and disrespect by a heavily armed, internationally supported foreign colonial power, the Palestinian masses rose up following a car crash in which an IDF driver killed four Palestinian workers. The First Intifada, which raged mostly intensely in late 1987 and early 1988 but would continue on and off for nearly six years, was characterized by huge mobilizations of the masses in both Gaza and the West Bank. Though some armed elements attempted guerilla warfare and terrorism on the sidelines, the mass movement itself was overwhelmingly non-violent. Tens of thousands of men, women, and children went into the streets demanding an end to the occupation of the Palestinian territories. Virtually the entire Palestinian labor force was on strike at various times, which greatly impacted Israel’s economy. The small shopkeepers were inspired to shut down their shops in solidarity, often defying the orders of local IDF soldiers. As has happened in numerous revolutions, the masses created their own leadership. Mass assemblies elected local committees whose authority rested on the masses to plan the course of the uprising.
The international media made a lot of noise about protestors throwing rocks and burning tires in the street. There is simply no comparison between the oppressed masses throwing rocks and the oppressor’s modern military with American money, assault rifles, tanks, artillery, air force, etc. Over a thousand Palestinians were shot dead during the intifada by Israeli forces whose own casualties due to isolated guerilla actions were far smaller.
Israel was desperate to end the Intifada as soon as possible. The Intifada threatened to expose all sorts of contradictions within Israeli society and military commanders feared the psychological effects daily repression was having on their own soldiers. Demoralization became widespread and former Israeli generals recommended Israel negotiate with Arafat (who was still widely supported by the masses despite being disconnected from the Intifada) to end the movement. Arafat was brought out of exile to wrap up the Intifada.
This set the stage for the Oslo Accords in 1993. Those Accords were sold to the world as the defining peace: two states living in harmony next to each other. This did not materialize. The Palestinian National Authority (dominated by Fatah) is not a sovereign state in any meaningful sense, and functionally exists to collaborate with the ever-expanding Israeli occupation in the West Bank. Hamas and other Islamists rose to prominence as Fatah discredited themselves. The more desperate mood amongst the masses seeded the many suicide bombings in the much more violent Second Intifada in the early 2000’s. The blood of Israeli civilians killed in this period ultimately stains the hands of the Zionists themselves.
In the 1970s and 1980s, Israeli intelligence services actually aided the forces who would form Hamas as a battering ram against the leftwing Palestinian factions. In their colonialist cynicism, the Israeli state created a formidable Frankenstein’s Monster who right up until Oct. 7, 2023, Netanyahu allowed payment to go to. This should totally expose the errant lie that the Israeli state is interested in protecting their own citizens.
The history and present of this region is full of tragedies. It is not the intent of the author to depress readers or to make them pessimistic. Quite the opposite; if we understand history, we can understand the present. An unprecedented international solidarity movement has arisen with the Palestinian people. A veritable sea change has occurred in American public opinion as support for Israel’s military actions sinks to record lows. The majority of the 2024 Presidential electorate favored a ceasefire in Gaza despite the two principal candidates being rabid warmongers.
Lenin once argued that nationalism is ultimately a war over bread. That is to say, under capitalism, different sections of the workers and poor are made to combat each other over the resources of society. This is precisely what has happened in Palestine: oppressed Jews escaping persecution in Europe were used as a battering ram by colonial forces against native farmers and workers. There is no material justification for what is happening in Gaza beyond the interests of the American and Israeli ruling classes to further imperialist war and to divide workers along ethno-religious lines. Israel is ultimately the client state of the United States, kept afloat on loan with American taxpayer dollars.
The top American one percent hoard an extraordinary $44 trillion dollars. That wealth, if it existed in democratically administered public ownership, could end all hunger, poverty, and ignorance in the world multiple times over. Enough money exists to rebuild Gaza, provide everyone with jobs and education, and guarantee Palestinian families the right to return to their former homes. If those homes were destroyed in the Nakba or are now occupied by Israeli families, then the wealth exists to compensate the former owners.
A better world is possible, one without either antisemitism or imperialism. We just have to fight for it. The best way to aid the Palestinian people is to fight to overthrow imperialism at home. Our labor movement should follow in the footsteps of French, Italian, and Greek dockworkers who refused to load arms to Israel. A mass movement led by organized labor to defeat Israeli imperialism would quickly tap into the mass discontent about the state of society and undermine Trumpism. It would revive last year’s student movement but on an even higher level.
Trotsky said that the crisis of humanity amounted to a crisis of leadership. Or in the words of Malcolm X, “We are not outnumbered, we are out organized.” The best thing any person who consciously wants to fight imperialism can do is to read up and get organized. The author is a member of the Revolutionary Communist International, an organization which has taken part in the Palestine solidarity movement for years, always expressing a class struggle, anti-imperialist perspective for ending the conflict. You can read more on our analysis of the Intifada and the wider conflict here.
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