On 13 October, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency commissioner Philippe Lazzarini said, “The scale and speed of the unfolding humanitarian crisis is bone-chilling”. To date, 13,000+ people have been killed, over 30,000 wounded and some 6,000 are considered missing. Images of families which have lost fathers, mothers and children—victims of a senseless struggle of national ambition – abound. On 3 November, the Gaza health ministry stated that Israel struck an ambulance convoy directly in front of Al-Shifa Hospital, killing at least 15 people and injuring 60 more. The horror of capitalist war in the Ukraine has been overshadowed by this massacre on the Med.
As ever, when there is killing to be done, God’s rep on earth is to be found sanctifying it. Just as God’s Anglicans were blessing the British killers as they set off for the Falklands, so the British Chief Rabbi Sir Ephraim Mirvis told (1/11) the Mayor of London his plan for a truce would only act as a “stepping stone to yet more Hamas terrorist brutality”. One might ask God’s spokesman precisely how a soldier carrying a gun or a pilot dropping a bomb can be engaging in self-defence as opposed to terrorist brutality against unarmed children, but then, one might as well engage in such a seminar with the fairies at the bottom of the garden.
The curse of nationalism is not new. Let it be clear that unlike certain anti-Zionists, socialists do not oppose the tunnel-vision mentality of nationalism only when it is Jewish. To us, the flag-waving, trigger-happy Zionists are no more ignorant and abhorrent than those who have swallowed the diversionary, nationalist message of Hamas. Socialists do not take sides in national conflicts because it is not our aim to support one or other of the competing capitalist or would-be capitalist factions, each of which seeks its own territories and exploitable populations. No socialist will ever fight to defend a border—we want to do away with the divisiveness of countries and states.
But there is a bitter irony about Zionist nationalism. In Dachau, the site of the old Nazi murder camp, a permanent exhibition stands as testimony to the atrocities committed in modern times against millions of Jews. That the survivors of such persecution sought refuge in a nation of their own—a country which would never persecute or exterminate anyone and would be free of the perverse national chauvinism on which Nazism was based—is not difficult to understand. In Israel, and here in Britain, not a few Zionists are now beginning to ask themselves the question: “How can it be that the country created by the holocaust is now inflicting similar misery on people who are just as defenceless as the Jews in Europe had been?” Some of them are blaming Netanyahu. Others say that Hamas has pushed the Israeli government to such measures. The truth is that those who saw a solution in Zionist nationalism—in having their own laws, prisons, borders, army and weapons of destruction—were naive. Their form of nationalism is no less aggressive or bigoted than is ever the case under a system of society where the laws of the jungle are presented as being the rules of civilised conduct. Every nation’s flag is dripping with the blood of its enemies; every ruling class pays for its power in other people’s lives.
Nationalism can never be a solution to the problems of oppression: it was not for the Jews; it would not be for the Palestinians. The problem is class, not national, racial, or religious origins. As a class, workers have no country. The British do not own Britain, the majority of Israelis have no significant economic stake in Israel, the impoverished Arabs do not share their exploiters’ national wealth. There are two classes in society: those who possess without producing and those who produce without possessing. Wars are fought over the interests of the capitalists and would-be capitalists. In the 1940s an aspirant Israeli ruling class, represented by such vicious thugs as the Stern gang (Menachem Begin, the sixth Prime Minister of Israel, was a key organizer of the 1946 Irgun terrorist attack on the King David Hotel in Jerusalem which killed 91 people, including 28 from these shores) used terrorist tactics to secure their goal. Having obtained power violently, who could have expected the Israeli ruling class to have maintained power except by the continued use of violence? Israeli workers identify with the aims of their rulers—they see their national identity as more important than their class identity with Arab and other workers. In this they are dangerously mistaken.
The socialist solution to the Middle East conflict is not a piecemeal policy. We do not advocate re-drawing the border or political deals or the exchange of one (American-backed) ruling class for another (Iranian/Russian-backed) one. These amount to mere rearrangements of the capitalist furniture. Only when Israeli and Arab workers join the worldwide movement for a society without class ownership, nations or armies will the war finally cease.
This is not a pious hope for the future. Workers are dying in Gaza and there is every sign that more will be killed. What is now a local war could turn into something rather bigger. Who will stop the killing once and for all—Biden, Netanyahu, Sinwar? To expect this to happen is like hoping for Putin and Zelensky to shake hands, make up and disarm. We leave such dreams to the Utopians who are fond of calling themselves Realists. For socialists, it is clear that if there is ever to be peace it is those who are the sitting targets of war who must actively pursue it.