Adopted by the ITO International Coordinating Committee
October 15, 2023
The greatest danger in the international situation continues to be the confrontation between the US-led imperialist bloc and the Russia-China imperialist bloc, whose sharpest expression is the Ukraine war. But other crises loom, including an imminent and probably severe economic downturn and accelerating climate change, both of which will intensify the misery of billions of workers and peasants around the world and lead to more wars and out-migrations.
Regional powers are maneuvering to take advantage of the great-power confrontation. One of the most pernicious of these maneuvers is Israel’s attempt to break the will of the Palestinian people to resist by expanding Zionist settlements in the West Bank, isolating Gaza as an open-air prison, and covering its genocide with “normalization” of its relations with Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and other reactionary Arab states.
The Hamas attack on Israel launched on October 7, fifty years after the start of the 1973 war by Egypt and Syria against Israel, shows that the Palestinian people still have the will to resist. Militarily, it is almost certain to be defeated, but politically, it has succeeded in demolishing the pretense that Israel and, behind it, the US, can have peace without justice in Palestine.
The Palestinian people in Gaza, the West Bank, and the diaspora support the Hamas action, whatever the outcome. The Arab people support it. The Saudi monarchy has had to put its rapprochement with Israel on hold. Workers and revolutionaries around the world should support it as an expression of Palestinian resistance, despite our criticism of Hamas, its martyrdom strategy, and its indiscriminate killings of civilians not armed or of military age (even if we recognize that this is in part an expression of the anger of Palestinians at the Israeli massacres and dispossession of their people).
With the Palestinian people, against the state of Israel
Completely independent of the religious right of Hamas, but always on the side of an oppressed people against the occupying forces
Hamas’ military attack is raising in these hours a wave of solidarity with Israel from all imperialist diplomacy, in every corner of the planet.
Tons of revolting hypocrisy, which ignores the oppression of Palestine, which confuses oppressors and oppressed, which removes the essential responsibility of imperialism in supporting Zionist terror.
As revolutionary Marxists, we have always denounced the political nature of Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood to which it belongs, the system by which it governs Gaza, its practices against civilians, the support it gives to the mullahs’ dictatorship in Iran or Erdogan’s regime in Turkey. But one thing is the political struggle against the religious right within the camp of Palestinian resistance to Zionism, another thing is to support the Zionist state against the Palestinian people and their right to resistance.
We have no doubt about which side we’re on. As everywhere in the world, we choose the unconditional defence of an oppressed people, its right to freely express its self-determination, its right to resistance against the occupying forces, regardless of the political nature of its leadership.
The state of Israel was born out of the expulsion of the Palestinian people from their land through the methods of terror. The entire history of the Zionist occupation of Palestine rests on the practice of terror. Terror practiced by the occupying military forces and settlers. Terror in the West Bank, whereas many as 700,000 settlers have now settled. Terror towards the people of Gaza, against whom Israel has already waged six wars in the last eighteen years, with several thousand Palestinians murdered.
Netanyahu’s current far-right government has extended and increased terrorist methods against the Palestinians and their rights. Just think about the barbaric operations recently waged by Zionist troops in the Jenin refugee camps.
To speak of “Israel’s right to its own defence”, all the more so today, simply means the shameless defence of the daily terrorism of Zionism.
To those who call for “peace in the Middle East”, we say that peace will never be possible between an oppressing state and an oppressed people. All so-called “peace agreements” with Israel, such as the famous Oslo Accords of 1993 (blessed by the reformist left all over the world), have turned out to be a deception for the Palestinians. Only the revolutionary dismantling of the state of Israel, of its legal, confessional, military foundations, can liberate Palestine, allowing Palestinians the right to return to their own land. Only the full and free self-determination of the Palestinian people will allow a peaceful coexistence with the Jewish minority. Only by framing the Palestinian resistance in a socialist perspective, in Palestine and throughout the Middle East, will it be possible to achieve this historic solution — the only real solution to the Palestinian question.