The current ceasefire in Gaza signals a heavy defeat for the Israeli settler-colonial regime and for its imperialist masters in the USA and Britain.
In 1948, a vicious campaign of terroristic ethnic cleansing forced 750,000 Palestinians into permanent exile, living as refugees in Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Syria and elsewhere. This is known in Arabic as the catastrophe, or Nakba. The steadfast refusal of their descendants to allow a second Nakba to force them en masse from their land, no matter the scale of the violence unleashed against them, stands as an inspiration to workers everywhere.
We in the imperialist heartlands must find a similar spirit of steadfastness in our efforts to build genuine solidarity with the Palestinian people’s ongoing liberation struggle.
A military defeat in Gaza
For over 15 months, the Israeli regime relentlessly bombarded the people of Gaza and destroyed their homes and infrastructure, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians and devastating everything necessary to sustain life. And yet for all the horrors that were inflicted on them, the Palestinian people refused to submit.
In the end, despite having the full backing of US and British arms and money, and despite their overwhelming air superiority, Israeli ground forces suffered devastating losses and were unable to hold any territory. Quite the reverse: Palestinian resistance fighters, masters of guerilla and tunnel warfare, ran rings around the armed forces who tried to capture their territory, destroying much of the equipment and many of the soldiers who were sent to subdue them.
The Israeli regime began its operation on 9 October 2023 with two stated aims: the elimination of Hamas (ie, of all Palestinian armed resistance) and the freeing of Israeli prisoners of war. These ‘hostages’ had been taken on 7 October with the aim of carrying out a prisoner swap (more than ten thousand Palestinians, many of them children, languish indefinitely in Israeli torture centres).
Having been fought to a standstill, the Israeli regime has now been forced to accept the very terms it had previously declared to be unthinkable – withdrawing from Gaza, allowing aid to reach its people, and freeing thousands of Palestinian political prisoners.
Military defeats in Lebanon and Yemen
Israel has failed, too, to win the war it launched against the Hezbollah resistance movement in Lebanon. Despite assassinating many members of Hezbollah’s leadership, and despite carrying out multiple waves of heinous terrorist attacks and carpet bombing of civilians, the Israeli army (IDF) was unable to advance more than a few kilometres into Lebanese territory, and is now being forced to evacuate whatever it had seized. As with the war of 2006, the zionist army has revealed itself to be incapable of defeating the Lebanese resistance.
A particularly honourable part has been played in this victory by the brave people of Yemen, who instigated a blockade of all zionist-affiliated shipping in Red Sea and beyond.
Withstanding repeated attacks from US and British air forces, the valiant Yemenis repeatedly forced Israeli, US, European and British shipping out of the Red Sea – in the process shooting down multiple US Reaper drones, scoring direct hits on military targets including the USS Dwight D Eisenhower, which was one of several aircraft carriers forced to leave the region in a hurry, and shutting down and bankrupting Israel’s port of Eilat.
Promising that such its blockade would remain in force for as long as the zionists were committing genocide in Gaza, and uncowed by the brutal reprisals of US and British bombers, the Yemeni people showed the world what true solidarity looks like – and earned the admiration and thanks of freedom-loving people everywhere as a result.
Zionist state and its backers in disarray
In Gaza, Lebanon and Yemen alike, the victory of the resistance is rooted in the extraordinary courage of the liberation fighters, which stems from their strong bond with and deep roots among the masses. As was shown during the great liberation wars waged by the colonised peoples of Korea, Algeria, Vietnam and Zimbabwe, a liberation movement that truly springs from the masses is almost impossible to defeat.
Facing both unsustainable losses and demoralisation in its armed forces, along with catastrophic economic crisis and a breakdown of cohesion in its society, the zionist regime has been forced to retreat. If this were a fight between the middle-eastern axis of resistance and Israel alone, Israel would certainly have collapsed.
While the imperialists continue their backing, the zionist state remains a dangerous enemy capable of doing great damage, but it has been seriously wounded and is increasingly unable to fulfil its primary function of keeping the middle east under the domination of Anglo-American imperialism.
Especially as both Yemen and Iran have both demonstrated their ability to hit military targets anywhere in Israeli territory with hypersonic weapons that cannot be stopped by Nato air defences.
In early 2009, leaks revealed that the CIA had commissioned a report into Israel’s viability which predicted that the zionist state would fall within 20 years. On today’s evidence, the imperialists may well struggle to keep their proxy going until 2029.
Faced with the humiliation of its zionist stooges, the US regime is casting about for new ways to try to maintain its dominant position in the region and keep the resistance from liberating all of Palestine. US president Donald Trump has been making deranged statements about “buying” or “owning” Gaza and evicting its Palestinian residents.
But while this may be something the US ruling class would like to be able to do, the last 15 months have shown that it has no way to carry out this fantastical programme. On the one hand, the Palestinians have made it clear they will not be moved, and that their armed resistance is even stronger and more determined than it was 18 months ago.
On the other hand, any attempt to move the people of Gaza into Jordan or Egypt, which has long been the mad desire of the zionists and which has been crudely reasserted by Trump as the path towards a “lasting solution” to the USA’s ‘Palestine problem’, would result in social implosion in those countries and the expansion of the war rather than the establishment of peace.
The fact is that US imperialism did everything possible to bolster the zionist war effort by sending unlimited arms and money. It blocked international action calling for a cessation of Israeli violence in the United Nations and elsewhere, buying the Israeli forces more time as they tried to expunge or expel every Palestinian from the Gaza Strip. It manipulated global mainstream media to promote zionist lies and hide the truth about what was happening. And it provided direct assistance in the form of special forces, pilots and mercenaries.
But in the end, its efforts merely served to highlight its own criminality and complicity, and to isolate both Israel and its imperialist enablers on the world stage.
A battle is won but the war continues
While Palestinians are celebrating their tremendous victory, they are well aware that their struggle is far from over. It must and will continue until their land has been liberated from imperialist control and the supremacist, apartheid ethnostate of Israel has been dismantled.
The wider struggle, as the late Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah repeatedly observed, will not be over until all the imperialists (US and British in particular) have been ejected from the entire middle-eastern region and its peoples are finally able to determine their own destiny.
The imperialists understand this, which is why they have given such staunch support to Israel through 15 months of highly-publicised genocide. The financiers of London and Wall Street are desperate to keep their boot on the throat of the masses in west Asia. Which is why the entire Nato war machine has been mobilised in support of Israel, and why Keir Starmer’s regime facilitates the USA in flying supplies to the genocidaires through British air bases.
Our tasks: non-cooperation and defence of democratic rights
Any imperialist move to continue waging war against the axis of resistance must be vigorously opposed, especially by workers in the USA and Britain. Our actions can make a real difference to the struggle in the middle east – which is exactly why the British ruling class has been ramping up repression against many of those who have taken a stand against the Gaza genocide.
By stealing the wealth of other nations, the monopoly class that runs imperialist society becomes ever richer and more powerful – and this is the secret of its ability to bribe working-class leaders, buying off their opposition as employers continue pushing down working-class living standards in Britain.
As home to the largest deposits of the world’s most crucial commodity – oil – the middle east is particularly essential to the global domination of American and British imperialism. Solidarity with Palestine is not only a question of common humanity and fellow feeling; it is a vital part of our own struggle for freedom as a class. When we allow our rulers the freedom to crush the liberties of others and grow rich by impoverishing foreign lands, we are also enabling them to maintain the strength to do the same to us here at home.
As part of working to deliver genuine solidarity to the Palestinian people, we must also defend the right of workers in Britain to free speech and the right of assembly. Such democratic rights have been under increasing attack as the true nature of Israel’s supremacist ideology, illegal occupation, apartheid state and genocidal war crimes have been brought to light.
The more that people turn against Israel; the more that hard facts make it difficult for the zionists and their imperialist backers to justify Israel’s crimes, the more we see western nations resorting to criminalisation and censorship as the means of last resort for silencing dissent and stopping the solidarity movement in its tracks. This is not a sign of strength but of desperation and weakness.
Our party comrades are among the many who have been arrested by police or disciplined at work on ludicrous and trumped-up charges. Their crime? Providing information about the true history and current crimes of zionism. Not only must we demand the protection of our right to speak these truths and to protest these crimes, but we must also demand that charges be dropped and convictions overturned for all those who have been subjected to this campaign of state harassment.
British workers must call on trade unions, antiwar and solidarity organisations to work together in building a mass campaign in defence of our rights, and in defence of all those unjustly persecuted.
We demand:
- An end to all military, intelligence and civilian cooperation with the zionist regime.
- The dismantling of all British bases overseas, of all US bases in Britain, and the end of all support for proxy forces anywhere in the world.
- The disbanding of the criminal and aggressive Nato military alliance, which spreads fascism and war across the globe, from south Korea to Palestine to the Donbass.
- A mass campaign in defence of democratic rights such as free speech and assembly, with a particular focus on publicising the plight, funding the defence, and overturning the convictions or sackings of those who have been targeted by the state for standing with Palestine.
- A mass campaign of non-cooperation with Israel and its war machine, including: refusing to make or move weapons and other supplies; refusing to provide support services or logistics; refusing to participate in technological or civil cooperation; refusing to distribute Israeli goods and services; and refusing to write, broadcast or distribute the media’s pro-zionist lies.
