The Conflict in Gaza

An immediate ceasefire is to be desired. The victims of conflict are always the working class who will be injured or killed, who will live in fear whilst it is ongoing, who will see the birth of even more hatred.

The real solution to the continuing carnage in Gaza and the wider area is for Palestinians and Israeli workers to understand their class position and recognise they have more in common with one another than they do with their ruling classes, be they Israeli or Hamas. Two States, One State or similar is not a solution. Zionism and other nationalisms (compounded by religious superstitions) only divide the working class.

"The workers have no country, they have a world to win" is as true a maxim today as it was in 1848. But such an internationalist position will only emerge when workers adopt the socialist position.

Within the tormented area of the struggle Arab and Jewish workers have already given evidence of where the chains rub them by the strikes that have taken place against Jewish, Arab and alien masters. These Jewish and Arab workers form the vast mass of the population of the territories involved; they are the poverty-stricken exploitable material without which neither the Jewish nor Arab capitalists and landowners, nor outside capitalists, would be able to reap their harvest of profit from those rich areas.

Industrially and commercially Jewish capitalists have been the progressive force. They have brought highly developed Western methods to a backward area, and in places have made the desert bloom. But with Western methods they have brought Western forms of wage-slavery and expanded under cover of nationalist ideals. For the Arab and Jewish worker neither Arab nor Jewish national independence will remove the mark of subservience from their brows. Their only hope of a life of comfort and security lies in joining with their brethren of other countries in a world socialist movement to overthrow capitalist domination in all its forms and establish Socialism in its place. Only a world Socialist system can remove from society the machinations of the oil and other capitalist interests that periodically turn the world into turmoil and bring greater misery to the millions of the workers.

(from an article "Palestine and its Problems", Socialist Standard, June 1948.)

The SPGB published a pamphlet in 1947 called The Racial Problem: A Socialist Analysis. (.pdf file.) It has three chapters on anti-semitism and Zionism which provide useful background information.