By OCR Leadership
November 2023
Despite the Nakba, despite 75 years of occupation and apartheid, despite repeated wars of aggression and land thefts, despite betrayals by Arab governments and Arafat and Abbas, despite hundreds of billions of dollars in US funding for Israel, the Palestinian people have remained steadfast in their struggle for national liberation. No amount of US money and weaponry, no amount of settler violence, no amount of Mossad fuckery, and no amount of Israeli bombs has been able to extinguish the resistance of the Palestinian people, which has long been an inspiration to the exploited and oppressed around the world. Regardless of our differences with the ideology and politics of Hamas, the 7 October 2023 lightning raid on Israel from the open-air prison that is the Gaza Strip was a powerful manifestation of the spirit of the Palestinian struggle, and it delivered a powerful blow to the Zionist enemy and the US-led imperialist bloc, demonstrating weaknesses in their supposedly invincible military power.
Israel’s response has been a genocidal war intended to mete out brutal punishment to all Palestinians and displace even more of them from their land. Initially, US imperialism and its closest allies were in lockstep in supporting Israel’s war, giving the most right-wing Zionist government yet carte blanche to carry out a genocide, with the US rushing to restock Israel’s armories with the latest death-doling contraptions. But a worldwide mass movement has emerged to demand an end to the war and challenge the legitimacy of not only Israel but also its imperialist backers. This movement has forced imperialists to start talking about “humanitarian pauses” and the president of France—a country whose distinguished imperialist history includes brutal (but failed) wars to maintain its colonies in Algeria and Vietnam—to even suggest that a ceasefire is necessary. And in countries neighboring and nearby Palestine, where the struggle of the Palestinian people has always been understood as part of a larger struggle against imperialism, the oil rentier bourgeoisie1 and the lackeys of US imperialism are in danger of losing whatever shred of legitimacy they have left, and maneuvering to prevent the war on Gaza from provoking a broader crisis. On the ground in Gaza, Palestinian guerrilla fighters are deploying innovative tactics against an exceptionally well-armed military, blowing up Israeli tanks and otherwise inflicting blows on the Zionist aggressor.
How the conflict on the ground and the geopolitical maneuvers around it play out remains to be seen, but it is clear that the mass movement around the world is having a positive effect. The focus of this statement is the challenges of the mass movement and the tasks of communists in the US. A deeper analysis of the events unfolding before our eyes and their historical backdrop, the various political forces in Palestine and the shifting political allegiances of the Palestinian people, the machinations of the Israeli bourgeoisie and the culpability of Israeli society as a whole, the role of Israel within the imperialist system, and the geopolitical dynamics of imperialist rivalry and oil rentier bourgeois interests in relation to Palestine are beyond the scope of this statement. We’ll just note here that on an international level, communists need to develop the ability to make and articulate such analysis, and we can look back to the journal A World To Win for a good model of how to do that.2
More Militancy, and Revolution – Counterrevolution – More Revolution
In the mass movement in the US against Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, two important contradictions have emerged which, if pushed on, could strengthen the movement’s power to affect the course of events and sharpen its spear tip against the US ruling class. First is the contradiction between the righteous moral outrage and desire to step beyond just registering dissent, on the one hand, and the the fact that most of the organizational leadership of the mass protests wants to keep the movement from busting out of bounds, on the other. (And no, the fact that some opportunists full of bluster started labeling their protests “shut it down” does not alter this contradiction, unless Webster’s dictionary changed the definition of “shut it down” to “briefly entering an office lobby and leaving before arrest was a possibility.”) This is a recurring contradiction playing out in every eruption of mass protest, which the journal kites has spoken to previously at length.3 The task of communists in relation to this contradiction is to unite the broadest number of people to push protest in the most radical direction possible—not stepping so far ahead of where the masses are at that we are isolated, but not tailing behind the mass desire to push resistance further or bowing to the opportunists in positions of organizational leadership over protests either. We should also be weary of the Leftist culture of using seemingly radical rhetoric to gloss over an unwillingness to take action that measures up to that rhetoric. Or, to put it another way, what’s more radical, Jewish Voices for Peace organizing mass civil disobedience or Leftist organizations vying to have the most provocative slogans about Palestinian resistance while avoiding any activity that could get them arrested?
The second contradiction is between not only protest but any articulation of dissent against Israel’s war and the repression of protest and dissent by various devices of bourgeois dictatorship, including firing people from their jobs, doxxing and other attacks by organized Zionist political forces, a media propaganda barrage that equates opposition to Israel’s war with antisemitism, and university administrations disbanding student organizations and banning protests. This repression reveals the real nature of bourgeois-democracy and is aimed at cowering the people into submission. Some have answered this repression with defiance, while others have wavered in the face of it. The shook ones need to grow a backbone, and reject postmodernist notions that our safety or, worse yet, our feelings are more important than resolutely standing with the Palestinian people. But even among many of the defiant ones, what tends to be lacking is a strategic sense of how to answer that repression—how to spiral up the revolution – counterrevolution dialectic to more revolution.
What’s needed to advance the mass movement is to answer each instance of repression by mounting a political counteroffensive, exposing the repression, making concrete demands (i.e., reinstating a fired professor’s job, rescinding a ban on protest, reinstating a student organization, etc.) to concretely defeat the instances of repression, and, crucially, mobilize the broad masses in our counteroffensives. The latter involves breaking out of the confines of the protesters and dissidents vs. Zionists and bourgeois authorities dynamic and taking the questions of Palestinian liberation, Israel’s genocidal war, and repression of dissent and protest out broadly in society and winning over people who are right now on the sidelines to take a stand, in the process repolarizing society in a more favorable way. Among our own ranks, we should oppose “left economist” tendencies that downplay the importance of the political battle being fought on college campuses right now. Yes, most of the student protesters think all kinds of postmodernist and Leftist nonsense, but it is exactly a political struggle like this one that can punch holes in the (petty-)bourgeois ideology they have been trained in. And we should bring to these college students a strategic sense of how to take the struggle to the masses broadly, on campus and off campus, to rally broader support.
To the proletariat, we should take up the spirit and orientation of Lenin’s What Is To Be Done?, carrying out agitation exposing Israel’s genocidal war and the repression of protest and dissent, and calling on proletarian masses to take a stand with the exploited and oppressed of the world. In doing so, we’ll be drawing forward the most advanced sentiments of the masses while challenging the backward ones, and fostering a proletarian internationalist outlook that rejects narrow thinking that centers the concerns of “my community,” which is ultimately, and often not so ultimately, an expression of “me first.”
Contending with repression is not a distraction or something off to the side of the mass movement against Israel’s war on Gaza or of our all-around work among the proletariat—it is a crucial means by which to advance the mass movement and develop the class-consciousness, fighting capacity, and organization of the proletariat. In meeting counterrevolution with more revolution, we can take inspiration from the Palestinian people, who have faced the vicious repression of the US-backed Israeli occupying forces but refused to back down.
Provoking a Crisis of Legitimacy
The role of the US bourgeoisie, and of the Anglo-American imperialist alliance (AAIA) it is part of, in backing Israel’s decades-long occupation of Palestine and its current genocidal war stands exposed before the world right now. Furthermore, the role of various bourgeois institutions in the US—from the mass media to academia to bourgeois electoral parties—as cogs in the imperialist machine that do not tolerate any real opposition to bourgeois interests has been greatly clarified. We could cite numerous examples of this clarity, such as the censure of US Representative Rashida Tlaib, and our work of exposure and agitation should skillfully deploy concrete examples, but the overall point is that this is how bourgeois dictatorship works. In this regard, it is important to reject petty-bourgeois wishful thinking or expectations that these bourgeois institutions should serve the people. In other words, college administrations are in the enemy camp, and while, tactically, we should work to defeat every instance of repression, strategically, we should welcome the fact that bourgeois institutions are exposing their true nature right now by doling out draconian repression against opposition to Israel’s genocidal war.
In the coming months, a crucial task of communists is to challenge the legitimacy of these institutions and bourgeois rule more generally, and to work towards a mass defection of allegiance away from bourgeois institutions. Beyond exposure, we need to wage political campaigns that delegitimize these institutions and win the masses to take a concrete stand against them. Doing so not only serves to advance the mass movement, but also to develop and deepen a mass understanding of the fundamental workings of the capitalist-imperialist system and the need to overthrow it. We should aim at nothing short of provoking a legitimacy crisis for bourgeois rule in the US, wherein the role of “our” bourgeoisie in backing and supporting a genocidal war is so thoroughly exposed and hated that their political rule is broadly thought of as completely illegitimate, and they have trouble ruling society in the old ways. Doing so will not only weaken the ability of “our” imperialist ruling class to carry out and support wars of aggression abroad, but also open up opportunities for revolutionary advance in the belly of the beast.
From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!
Long live the steadfast spirit of the Palestinian people!
Let that spirit spread across the globe and inspire us all to bring imperialism down once and for all!
ENDNOTES
1 Stay tuned to the journal kites for an article that will explain this class and its role in contemporary capitalism-imperialism; for now, just think of the Saudi monarchy as one example of this class.
2 See especially A World To Win #11 for a detailed and multi-faceted communist analysis of the first intifada.
3 See, especially, “Some Orientation to Our Readers on the Continued Struggle Against Police Killing,” published 13 February 2023 on kites-journal.org and to be published in a future print issue.
Going Against the Tide: A journal charting a path for communist revolution in the US 