War is the climax of the nightmare in Gaza. We hear the numbers rise every day, but the losses are immeasurable. Like many of the past 50 years, it is an asymmetric war, which in this case means that one side’s troops first enter a home to kill an entire family, while the other can rain down bombs to the same end. Asymmetry means that many more Gazans have been murdered than Israelis, as they are the collateral damage whose lives each army has written off as an acceptable cost. We call for an immediate end to the war, the release of hostages and prisoners, an end to the blockade. We call to build international solidarity against warmongers and nation-builders.
We refuse the language of right to the land, of border legitimacy, and of national security. The rallying cries and waving flags hide the truth: we are being tricked, bribed, or forced into the wars of our masters. We refuse to excuse mass murder in the name of “justice”, “resistance”, or “defense”. War can never bring peace or freedom beyond the peace of a graveyard and the freedom to pillage the dead.
We are not pacifists, either. A truce won’t free Gaza from the nightmare. The IDF will resume its peacetime role as prison guard, and its junior partner Hamas (or its heirs) as a prison gang. In Gaza, Israel imposes misery by limiting the flow of capital and supplies across the border, and Hamas manages this misery by taxing goods and crushing protests. For most of humanity, the end of war is at best a return to business as usual: to work their lives away to buy survival, rely on aid if there is no work, scrounge for food if there is no aid, or starve if there is no food. In Gaza, wages, aid, and food are limited. Can fighting every day to scrape by — just enough to survive — really be called “peace”?
Each side fights to change the division of power between them. As always, each side uses the other’s brutality to justify its own. As always, whoever wins, humanity loses. In Israel-Palestine, the unspoken truce was suddenly broken, as it was broken in recent years in Ukraine, in the Caucasus, and in Sudan. Frozen fronts have melted, and others seem on the verge of doing so. Everywhere military spending is rising. We are told this is needed as more war may be coming. This is all against the background of a world economy sinking steadily deeper into crisis, from which its managers know no way out — no way out but war. The destabilizing effect of this crisis melts frozen fronts across the world. Opportunities and necessities arise as existing balances of power shift. And like the weapons which must be produced for war, minds must be molded for the same purpose. Our rulers want us to admire soldiers, glorify battlefield victories, wave national flags and be convinced that fighting for justice means supporting one side against the other in inter-imperialist conflicts, which all wars are today. Siding with the nation always means siding with the ruling class of the nation, the managers or would-be managers of its capital.
Israel is not waging a colonial war in Gaza. It is collectively punishing the Gazan population for the actions of Hamas and seeks to discipline it with total warlike methods. On the West Bank it continues to eject Palestinians to provide a lebensraum for Israeli settlers. But this is also an interimperialist war, in which the US and Iran and its allies confront each other through their Israeli and Palestinian proxies. However, among the highly developed economies, Israel is unique in the proportion of surplus population under its management. The growth of a surplus population that cannot be profitably exploited by capital is a global trend. Deportations, mass incarceration, and forced displacement are common peacetime solutions, but war is capitalism’s gold standard to clear the way for growth. Israel’s combined solution of bombing concentration camps gives us a chilling view into the future of capitalism’s death world.
Freedom for Gazans can never be found in a “Free Palestine”. Even if Palestinian nationalism could wrest territory from Israel and form a state, would Palestinians get “their” land back? Nowhere in the world is there a country that belongs to “the people”. Everywhere the land and everything on it belongs to the owners. There is not a single national “liberation” struggle that freed the bulk of the population from hunger and powerlessness.
The nightmare of Gaza is a nightmare that dominates the world. In Yemen it is famine, in the Amazon it is deforestation, and everywhere it is poverty and war. The nightmare is capitalism, a social structure which begins with dispossessing most of humanity from what we need to survive. We are forced to work, animating this machine that turns life into money, whose power grows as ours is stolen. More and more the machine’s intake gets clogged, and the feed of people must be thinned out before profit extraction can resume.
When the nightmare fills our minds, it makes this world’s everyday insanity seem as normal and natural as gravity. When one forgets that another world is possible, oxymorons like “fair borders” and “humane wars” seem like sensible demands. The only way out of capitalism’s nightmare of war and work is to collectively wake up: to see the machine for what it is, to overthrow its deputies, and to reclaim our power as makers of this world. We must remake the world for all of humanity, rather than for money and its power. Until then, the monsters of class, state, and nation will haunt the earth.
We call for an end to this war, these borders, and all divisions which pit the working class against itself. We call for international solidarity and the self-organization of the working class. We call for real communism: a human community without exploitation, with freedom and dignity for all.
“Workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains. You have a world to win.”
Internationalist Perspective, December 2023