After seventy-five years of genocidal policies and warfare aimed at Palestine, the scales are falling from the eyes of the advanced workers in the U.S. Although anti-zionist movements have had some currency for decades, it’s only now, with the latest continuation of the Nakba after the heroic resistance attacks of October 7, 2023, that the issue has been brought to the forefront of labor organizing within the U.S. empire. Union rank and file have broken with their captured leadership to proclaim support for the cause of Palestine. Every day, the issue of the zionist genocide drives more U.S. politicians to expose themselves as the playthings of the capitalist ruling class. Even the political caste of staffers and interns in Washington have raised their voices in support of Palestine, and they, too, have been silenced. The rot of the political system stinks more and more each hour.
The question of national self-determination for Palestine and its conflict with the zionist state subsumes a number of contradictions within it. The chains of empire snap where they are their weakest: in the periphery and among backwards, besieged, or otherwise destabilized regions. Yes, the zionist state is an outpost of U.S. imperialism in West Asia. However, it is not merely an appendage of the U.S. imperial ruling class. Zionism has its own politics, and the zionist state has its own internal structure and conflicts. Further, it is not a “simple” vassal state — the zionists have long had their own agendas which they have used U.S. and NATO influence to further. Although the zionists are used as the pawns of the U.S. empire, they are not simple pawns. They have an autonomous will of their own, their own goals, and they are sometimes in direct alignment with the U.S. imperial interests, but more often in some manner of misalignment.
This current crisis, that of the successful resistance battles that have been ongoing since October 7, has put the zionists into the greatest degree of contradiction with the U.S. empire that they have experienced in this century.
Let us take stock: the U.S. is embroiled in a heated proxy war in Ukraine, where it is squandering influence and treasure daily. Although it expects to profit from this war, the profits are not immediate, and some of them were meant to come in the form of decreased influence of the Russian Federation globally. Instead, the proxy war the U.S. provoked has created a new axis of non-aligned states and put many countries of the Third World into alignment with both the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China. U.S.-NATO aggression has created this new non-aligned pact.
Domestically, the U.S. empire has been fighting its own growing insurgency in the fascist stronghold of the South (see the section “Fortresses of Fascism” in the Red Clarion piece, The Two Faces of Fascism). Since 2020, a simmering insurgency, unformed and inchoate, has been threatening to break out now and again into open conflict with the state. The latest domestic expression of this insurgency is concentrated around Atlanta’s Cop City project, but its nascent tendrils extend into every progressive struggle in the U.S., including the abortive attempts to claw back labor contracts from the brink of total liquidation and the fight to secure reproductive autonomy.
COVID-19 still rages within the U.S. and abroad; the responses in the capitalist West have been utterly inconsequential compared to the coming waves of the disease. As a result, the economies of the West, which had been limping along since 2008 on the hobbled limbs of loosened credit and lowered regulations, are now in danger of entering total freefall. Speculation is rampant and threatens almost monthly to bring down the entire capitalist world-economy. The foundations of the Western markets have been reduced to sand. Although the servitors of the empire are continuously trying to shore up and reinforce the fundamental weakness, the time is not far off when a series of major bank failures will bring down the world market.
The Democratic Party, on its last legs, was offered one last chance to prove it could stabilize an increasingly unstable empire in the form of the Biden presidency. It has failed. Biden’s regime has been unable to prevent massive social unrest, ideological decay, or the further hollowing out of the western market.
Earlier this year, internal conflicts erupted within the zionist state itself between its far-right ruling party and its center-right settler population. Netanyahu, the far-right ideologue who embodies the most fascistic elements of zionist society, neutered the zionist state’s Supreme Court by denying it the ability to rule laws unconstitutional and essentially subjecting it entirely to the control of the Knesset. This provoked waves of demonstration, civil disobedience, and even downright defection. The left wing of zionist settler-society is now at odds with the narrowing right wing. Likud, the governing party, is now operating from a very narrow base of support indeed and, had the Likud government not responded to October 7 with its genocidal second phase of the Nakba, it was likely on its way out. It is only the “coalition government,” created in response to the existential threat of the Palestinian resistance, that permits Likud to keep a tenuous hold on state power.
However, the zionist security apparatus is failing. October 7 and its aftermath have been devastating to a security regime that cannot afford to lose a single battle, let alone a war. Daily, the victories of the Palestinian resistance threaten the faith of the U.S. ruling class in the ability of the zionists to project U.S. power. Daily, these victories — the decimation of the zionist motorized infantry and tanks, the continuous loss of zionist troops, the failure of the zionists to achieve any major operational goals — undermine Likud and the far right within the zionist state.
Further, it’s become possible to receive instantaneous and hard-to-censor data from the conflict. Recordings from phones and computers and messages from the colonized areas that are simultaneous with the atrocities being committed have changed the face of genocidal warfare. Despite the zionist’s best efforts, it is impossible to hide their depravity. Likud’s Second Nakba, perpetrated to allow the farthest-right reactionary elements of the zionist ruling class to retain power, has now exposed the zionist project to the world.
As it stands exposed, the U.S. ruling class is exposed with it. Ripping the curtain back from the zionists has forced U.S. politicians to allow their own garments to be torn away. Even the most progressive-leaning U.S. lawmakers, like angry grandfather Bernie Sanders, cannot help but stand alongside the genocidal regime, endorsing the wholesale slaughter of innocents in Gaza and the West Bank. Almost without exception, the political class-fraction of the U.S. empire has chosen to double down on zionist lies — even after the news media reveals them to be unfounded. Bloodthirsty president Biden continues to repeat the zionist lie of “beheaded babies” even after his own office has repeatedly walked it back. Advanced workers now see these politicians as they are: naked opportunists, willing to not only pander to but actively support genocide for their own gain.
The issue of Palestine is the issue at the head of the spear. The chain of empire now strains and groans under the Palestinian resistance. The pressure by the resistance coalition, led by Hamas but composed of many liberatory groups in alliance, has caused this chain to strain and threatens to snap it. Prior to the outbreak of the current October 7 struggle, class-consciousness was developing unevenly throughout the U.S. and coalescing around different struggles. Since October 7, as the threat to the imperialist system grows ever more acute and the zionist state is backed into a corner, class-consciousness has exploded across the globe. The Palestinian struggle for liberation and self-determination has moved to the forefront of the fight. It has manifested as the issue through which class-consciousness can be realized, developed, and mobilized against the imperialist system. International class-consciousness is growing at leaps and bounds; both inside the U.S. Empire and across the world, the recognition that the struggle of Palestine for freedom is wrapped up in the overall struggle for liberation is growing. Every time the capitalist states lash out against anti-zionists, more workers realize that the state is not on their side. We can see this in the vicious state repression now being unleashed against pro-Palestine anti-zionists across the U.S. empire. Class consciousness, as consciousness of imperialism, is growing at a remarkable rate. A new day of resistance is dawning!
