Displaying items by tag: Middle East

Full support to the Palestinian struggle

The Zionist bombardments of the Gaza Strip launched by Netanyahu and the IDF (Israeli Defense Forces) on Tuesday May 11^th and Wednesday May 12^th are the most recent acts of an escalation in the Zionist offensive to definitively strip the Palestinians of their right to national self-determination. For imperialism and Israel, the surprise was the capacity of Hamas to respond to the provocations with attacks on Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, something that had not happened for years. The launching of rockets whose offensive capacity is tiny compared to the firepower of the Israeli air force, far from what the Zionist propaganda portrays, is simply a response to the new colonialist offensive of Zionism.

Immediate causes

The elements of the conjuncture that ignited the clashes are related to a series of provocations mounted by the Israeli entity and by Zionist ultra-right movements. On Monday 5/10, the Israeli Supreme Court was to rule on a lawsuit to evict Palestinian inhabitants of the neighborhoods of Sheikh Jarrah and Silwan, in East Jerusalem. In the end, the court did not issue its decision on that day, but that fact evoked the metaphor of the dispossession of a people from its territory, surprisingly inciting celebratory mobilizations, since every May 10 Zionism "celebrates" its occupation of East Jerusalem in the so-called 6-day war of 1967. This year, the mobilization was organized by the ultra-right and was intended to intimidate not only the Palestinian neighborhoods of the city, but also to outrage Muslim religious temples. The Zionist security forces, for their part, exerted pressure on the Palestinian population by restricting the possibility of gathering around the temples, especially the Al-Aqsa Mosque, on the grounds of anti-COVID health measures. Of course, while declaiming that the Israeli population has already reached herd immunity thanks to the mass vaccination supported by the Zionists and imperialism, we can ask ourselves... how many Palestinians have been vaccinated? Yet another metaphor of this rotten system. However, the provocations didn’t remain unanswered: the Palestinians confronted the security forces in the old city of Jerusalem, the ultra-right march had to be diverted by the authorities, and in the face of the repression of the Palestinian demonstrations, the armed groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad began the rocket attack on Jerusalem, which continued the following day on the economic capital, the "invulnerable" Tel Aviv, putting the Israeli "iron dome" anti-projectile shield to test.

After the rockets were launched, the IDF advanced and intensified its bombardment of the Gaza Strip, with clashes also occurring in the West Bank (western bank of the Jordan River) and, another new development, clashes within Israel itself in cities with large Arab populations such as Lod. Over time, demonstrations in support of the Palestinians have spread to other cities in the Arab world, such as Amman (Jordan) and Beirut (Lebanon), and even to London, Chicago and other European and US cities. At the time of writing, Israeli bombardments and the launching of rockets from the Palestinian side continue, with a toll of at least 65 Palestinians, among them 14 children, and 7 Israelis dead (El País, 5/12) and hundreds of wounded.

To complete the picture, it’s also necessary to take into account the political crises affecting both Israel and the PA. Israel is coming from 4 failed elections, which have so far failed to establish a government majority within its parliamentary system, although they have registered a shift to the right and extreme right of the possible coalitions, pressuring the government to a hard line, more and more prone to complete the ethnic cleansing. Meanwhile, Abbas of the Fatah movement, the current "virtual" president of a PA without territorial control, decided to postpone the PA elections, triggering a crisis with Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip and is estimated to be in a position to win those elections.

War in Palestinian territory

It’s necessary to remember that before the Zionist occupation, which began before the creation of Israel, the territory where the Zionist enclave and the semi-occupied Palestinian territories are located today, was the historic Palestine. After the partition, as it was literally called by the UN, Israel not only evicted the Palestinian inhabitants that populated its "half", but has been engaged in annexing the rest of the territory. In the 1967 war, it invaded East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, along with the Golan Heights (Syria) and the Sinai (Egypt). After various peace agreements, from Camp David to Oslo, the project of US imperialism was to try to negotiate a status quo by creating a phantom Palestinian Authority (PA) to govern, under Israeli tutelage, what would be a future Palestinian state in the first 3 territories. It should be noted that the Gaza Strip, on the one hand, and the West Bank and East Jerusalem, on the other, have no territorial continuity whatsoever: the Israeli territory separates them. This fraud of a plan, which later acquired the name of road map, was not even carried out, with the hard wing of Zionism advancing the colonization of the West Bank and East Jerusalem through the movement of settlers and the establishment of checkpoints. Today, 220,000 Zionist settlers have taken up residence in the "Palestinian part" of Jerusalem, claiming the right to "return" to pre-partition lands, a right they deny to Palestinians not only from the semi-occupied territories, but from refugee camps in Arab countries and those who emigrated to the rest of the world.

Under Donald Trump’s administration, Netanyahu and Israel achieved a major breakthrough which was the recognition of Jerusalem as the indivisible capital, with the US establishing its embassy in the city. This changed the status and showed an even more open turn of imperialism in favor of Zionism and blocked any attempt to negotiate any kind of peace agreement. This line was followed by several Arab countries, such as Morocco and several states of the Persian Gulf, and also had an important support in the dictatorship of General Al-Sisi in Egypt, which sealed the western border to the Gaza Strip, the only Palestinian territory where the Israeli security forces have no control, although it’s actually an open-air prison besieged by Zionist planes, which today unload their bombs on the population.

Today, there’s a great mystery regarding Joe Biden's plan for the region. While discursively he has shown himself to be tending to a greater balance in an attempt to resume negotiations, the current conflict is a litmus test of his ability to discipline the extreme Zionist wing and at the same time try to liquidate through negotiations the Palestinian national liberation aspirations under the permanent imperialist tutelage of the PA or any other artifact that serves those ends. The breakdown of the post-war institutions, which in fact created Israel (UN), is the structural problem it faces in providing any way out for the problem.

For the defeat of Israel

The proletariat of the whole world and its vanguard must be clear that this is not a confrontation "of centuries" (Zionism began to colonize Palestine at the beginning of the 20th century and Israel was created in 1948) between two peoples but a struggle between an oppressed nation and the establishment of an imperialist enclave in the heart of the Middle East to control its strategic interests and oil. Zionism is a reactionary ideology and movement, which postulated a reactionary way out for the Jewish people, persecuted for centuries, based on the colonization of a territory inhabited by another people and to defend the interests of imperialism. For this reason, we say that Israel is not even a bourgeois state properly speaking, but an imperialist spawn created at the moment of its greatest decomposition. The revolutionaries and the vanguard of the working class must intervene in this conflict on the side of the Palestinians, with actions that affect imperialism and its military machine in production, such as the stoppage in the imperialist industries and the blockade of the transports destined to or coming from Israel. We must support all the mobilizations for the end of the Israeli bombings, for the end of the blockade of Gaza and for the withdrawal of the checkpoints and colonies from Jerusalem and the West Bank. The workers of the countries of the region, first of all their central battalions of the oil branch, hold the key to advance in the expulsion of imperialism from Syria, Iraq, Libya and, of course, Palestine, fighting against the Arab bourgeois governments that are accomplices and partners of imperialism. They have a great ally in, and must seek the support of, the workers movement of Europe and the US, who suffer the attacks of imperialism to unload its crisis and the costs of the pandemic.

For the destruction of the State of Israel!

For a Federation of Socialist Republics of the Middle East and the Maghreb!

(first published in Spanish on May 13^th)

For the defeat of Imperialism in the Middle East

Stop USA’s war machinery

 COR Argentina - January 2020

Thursday 2nd January at dawn. Assassin drones sent by Trump under the advise of the Yankee military high command shoot on the Iranian General Qasem Soleimani, who dies along with several collaborators. Soleimani was in Baghdad and was executed with no previous trial, like many others under imperialist fire. But in this case, we are talking about an officer of a foreign State and within the territory of another State –in the papers independent, although it is clear that the occupation of Irak on behalf of the Yankees has never ceased.

Trump hesitates. His policy was to withdraw the American troop out of the Middle East, including Afghanistan and Iraq. He wants to take advantage of the fact that the USA don’t depend so much on the oil of the region, thanks to the “fracking revolution” within their own territory and an eventual “recovery" of Venezuela. But the high commands of the Pentagon convince him of responding to the attack on the American Embassy in Iraq, that took place the last day of 2019. This attack had peculiarities: it was a popular demonstration against the American presence in Iraq. Trump accepts that its necessary to respond and orders the assassination of the Iranian General. It is an act of war against another State, outside any umbrella of imperialist international legality. It is a brutal demonstration of force on behalf of the imperialist Power that leads the world.

But the killing actually shows the weakness of the US. Of course, not from the military point of view, where its supremacy is uncontestable, at least in the mid-term. It is a weakness of its position in the State system, configured as superstructure of global capitalism. It is a structural weakness, due to the deepening of imperialist decomposition, and it’s as well determined by the dangerous cracking of the postwar balance. The attack against Soleimani was not included in any action plan. The events that happened later show it. The Iraqi Parliament voted a request for the Prime Minister “in charge” (a definition itself) Adel Abdul Mahdi –that had given up the job under the pressure of the popular demonstrations in November- to start the process of American troops out of the country. The high command of American forces in Iraq answered in a letter that they would get out, but they requested that they did it in order. Then the Pentagon discredited they command “in the field”, denying any initiative of troops withdrawal. Of course, that withdrawal would ultimately configure a resounding victory for Iran and a huge defeat for the USA.

Mass processes

The American weakness doesn’t contradict the weakness of the Iranian government itself. Obviously, it is a semi-colony that cannot confront imperialism in an open war. But this weakness also finds its roots in the situation of national sub-bourgeoisies within the capitalist crisis, who receive the pressure of imperialist aggressions, on the one hand, and, on the other, of mass mobilizations –that in Iran took were very strong in November, in the frame of a regional process that also crosses Lebanon, Iraq and, at the same time, there are class struggle processes going on in Latin America and the Caribbean, Hong Kong, Africa, Europe, etc.

The element of mass processes is qualitative to analyze the ongoing conflict. If we go back to the previous processes (2010-2011) that took place in the region after the economic outburst of 2008, with the downfall of many dictators that governed their countries with iron fist (Ben Ali in Tunisia, Gaddafi in Libya, Mubarak in Egypt) we may see how those processes leaded to several failed way outs –from the coup in Egypt to the Tunisian semi-democratic semi-Bonapartism. But what predominated was the decomposition of the States in their most brutal way: civil war in Syria and the upsurge of ISIS, an actual anti-State. This decomposition blocked out the paths for mass processes through cooptation by counterrevolutionary bourgeois or petty bourgeois leaderships. Once again, the crisis of revolutionary leadership of the proletariat has appeared as the crisis of humanity. The confusion of aims of the new generation of fighters in this crisis situation determines the tortuous element of the process.

Now, the upraise of ISIS and the civil war in Syria forced imperialism to agree with old enemies in order to try to stop the threat of this monstrosity, against the very idea of nation-State, that is the form of class domination of the bourgeoisie. So, the anti-ISIS fronts and the compromises with Russia (and Iran) are born to limit this. In the middle, there are other very important events like the failed coup in Turkey and the development of autonomic experiences in Kurdistan, which we will not deal with in this article. It is important to underline that the current stationing of American troops in Iraq happened under the pretext of this war against ISIS. In 2019 imperialist forces announce the end of ISIS. But with its defeat, any of the contradictions in the region have been closed and this is proved by this current military escalation with Iran.

Vietnamization

A lot has been said about this term to describe Iran’s policy in the region in the last years. Superficially, it is described as an asymmetric war policy between a military weak State and the main world Power, only considering the field of tactics. Vietnamization so understood would be the use of guerrilla war or “proxy” confrontation (through others). Without denying this tactic element, Soleimani was the General in charge of a more complex challenge: to unify the different ethnic and religious factions in Iraq and, in a more general way, of the whole region with the only aim of freeing it from the “great Satan" that is America. In fact, that is the official line that Iran has made public with the declarations of Ayatollah Jamenei. So we are talking about a policy that aims to give a national liberation goal to the religious movements by building up the so called “resistance front", that includes Iran, Syria, Hezbollah, Hamas and other bourgeois or petty bourgeois groupings. This policy on behalf of Soleimani, and its relative success, could be one of the most important motives for his assassination, above all, taking into account the immediate cause that lead to it was the demonstration against the American Embassy in Baghdad, that made the American administration evacuate its diplomatic staff. Now, the Iranian’s government policy does not aim national liberation of the peoples of the Middle East, but rather the strengthening of a semi State able to bargain with imperialism, using as cannon fodder the heroic resistances of Palestine and Iraq, and supporting without hesitations one of the main war criminals in the region, Al Assad, only after Trump, Obama and the Israeli  governments. The negotiations for the nuclear plan are a good example of the class character and the counterrevolutionary nature of this policy.

The quagmire in Iraq resounds like the situation in Vietnam, that is real. As we said before, even with a Trump administration looking forward to leave the occupation behind, it can´t be done now, nor any way put can be found to withdraw without that being understood as a huge defeat for imperialism. Therefore, now it is possible that the ongoing conflict continues to escalate. Specially now, after the first Iranian response, that consisted in a bombing of two military bases in Iraq on Janury 8th, that although quite limited were still a humiliation for the US. Trumps response has limited to minimize the damage caused by these bombardments and to announce new economic sanctions; while he asks the rest of the imperialist Powers to commit to isolate Iran and abandon the nuclear agreement by imposing sanctions, and request the NATO a more active intervention in the region.

Uncertain scenario

A lot has been said about the American domestic front as a reason for the attack. We mean the consideration regarding the impeachment process against Trump and the presidential elections. Although this might have an influence, the strategic elements (or of weakness of this strategy) we believe are more important so as to develop a characterization of the possible new war of American imperialism. And here there exists a determining factor of the so-called domestic front, which is the inability of the imperialist State to win over a solid social base –in which the labor aristocracy must play a role- to launch a large-scale military offensive. We think that the conquest of such a social base, which was one of Trump’s aims, has not been achieved, as we can see in the development of a variety of labor conflicts in industry, services and public workers, and as it is also shown by demonstrations against an intervention in Iran that took place the first weekend of January, immediately after Soleimani’s killing, in many cities of the US. For the time being the demonstrations have not been massive, but they open the possibility of the development of a mobilization against a greater imperialist intervention.

Another important factor are the economic consequences of the war, that could accelerate the entrance in a recession of the global economy, which has been forecasted and, up to now, is being retarded. Geopolitical instability has shaken financial and commodity markets. This instability becomes uncertainty and it is pointed put by the withdrawal of some NATO allies of their troops in Iraq, the European lack of definition in face of the events and even Israeli hesitations towards the assassination of Soleimani. If for some time we have been assessing the contradictions of Trump’s policy at implementing a turn of imperialist policy, today come up some doubts about the possibility of a failure that leads the cracking of the postwar balance to a much more chaotic world situation.

Out imperialism of the Middle East

Iraq has been military occupied for the last 17 years. Palestine, since 1948, by the Israeli creature that responds to the imperialist needs of control over the Middle East. Imperialist plundering of the region has been going on for a long time, but the ongoing imperialist decomposition, worsened by the global crisis, accelerates the situation of unbalance of the system of States and the decomposition of the nation-State. In face of this, mass responses have not missed. They have come out in a spontaneous way and with confusion of aims, which allowed counterrevolutionary leaderships to lead the different national processes to dead ends. But imperialism has not been able to close the crisis and, therefore, the processes open up again placing before revolutionaries the main challenge to intervene decisively in them, so as to draw lessons from the previous defeats and make them useful to develop a transitional program between the current capitalist decomposition and the socialist future of humanity. The centrality of the working class in these processes is marked by the need to dispute bourgeois and petty bourgeois leaderships the leading role against imperialism. For that, internationalist policy and leadership are needed, working for the unity of the proletariat of the region, centered in the oil workers, along with the working class of the imperialist countries, especially the USA. Therefore, it is necessary that revolutionaries fight for the American and European unions to declare the stoppage of the imperialist war machinery, by occupying factories and blocking the supply of troops established in the region and Israel. In the Latin American countries, besides developing street demonstrations and denounce the complicity of Fernández, Bolsonaro, Piñera and other sepoys, we must propose the stoppage of imperialist industries against the intervention in the Middle East. This struggle is linked to the fight against the IMF’s reforms that those governments intend to apply in our region. We must develop the organization and the struggle to force all the imperialist troops to withdraw from the Middle East and the other semicolonial countries. For the military defeat of the US in Iraq and Iran. For the destruction of Israel. For a Federation of Socialist Republics in the Middle East. For the reconstruction of the IV International.