Proletarians of All Countries, Unite!

FROM THE COMING ISSUE #53 OF THE MAGAZINE RED SUN:

ZIONISM, IMPERIALISM AND THE INVINCIBLE
NATIONAL LIBERATION STRUGGLE OF PALESTINE

The question of Palestine, the state of Israel and Zionism cannot be understood outside of the context of imperialism. “Jewish” nationalism, in the shape of Zionism, and Palestinian nationalism are both defined by their respective relationship with imperialism. While Zionism since its creation is the project of the European Jewish bourgeoisie to serve imperialism and combat the oppressed peoples, Palestinian nationalism since its beginning represents the struggle of the Palestinian people for national liberation against imperialism and Zionism. Thus, Zionism in all its variants and the imperialist monstrosity that is the state of Israel are part of the reactionary and counterrevolutionary forces, and the Palestinian people is part of the progressive and revolutionary forces of the world.

Today, the Palestinian struggle, the ongoing Zionist genocide and the powerful global movement of support for Palestine emphasize and sharpen even more the principal contradiction in the world today, between imperialism and the oppressed nations of the Third World. This is the main thing, but as Marxist-Leninist-Maoists we know that the struggle against imperialism cannot be separated from the class struggle; we know that in order to analyze the problems of the Palestinian struggle (the role of the Palestinian Authority, the “peace agreements”, the position of the other Arab countries etc.) we have to see the class character of the organizations and governments and their leaders. In this way, the Palestinian struggle also emphasizes the urgent question of what class must lead the national liberation struggle: the bourgeoisie or the proletariat.

Accordingly, to correctly analyze the role of Zionism and the Palestinian struggle, we have to see the question in its historical context and as a part of the class struggle, sweeping away all the obscurities and distortions spread by imperialism, reaction and revisionism concerning this issue. This is the purpose of the present article.

 

Antisemitism

Antisemitism, in the sense of hatred against Jews, has been a part of the ideology of the exploiting and reactionary classes in Europe since the Middle Ages, spread particularly by the church, especially the Lutheran church. Martin Luther said that “They [Jews] are a heavy burden like a plague, pestilence or misfortune in our country”. During the time of the bourgeois revolution, the counterrevolutionary forces pointed at the Jews as the promoters of rebellion and disorder. The German historian Heinrich Leo (1799-1878) stated: “The Jewish nation is obviously distinguished from all other nations of this world by the fact that it possesses a spirit that is particularly apt for corrosion and decomposition”. Later, the bourgeoisie as ruling class, especially with the development of imperialism as the higher and final stage of capitalism, inherited this idea: “The Jews have everywhere incited the plebeians against the ruling class. They have everywhere incited discontent with the established power… They have everywhere stimulated feelings of hate between people of the same blood. It is they who have invented the theory of class struggle.” (Martin Bormann 1944).

In the era of imperialism (mainly the period up until World War II), antisemitism is a part of the ideology and politics of the imperialist bourgeoisies in Europe and the United States, mainly as an ideological front for anticommunism; and in the struggle against the international communist movement and the Soviet Union all the imperialist powers were colluded. Since the Jews did not form a homogenous group – they also had their reactionaries, progressives and revolutionaries – the antisemitism of this period always upheld the idea of “good Jews and bad Jews”. This idea was put forward quite clearly in an article by Winston Churchill in 1920, where this genocidal imperialist expresses his full agreement with the theory of the Jewish “global conspiracy for the overthrow of civilization”, but also his praise for the “national Jews” – the Zionists. The article, titled “Zionism versus Bolshevism: a Struggle for the Soul of the Jewish People”, gives us a clear image of the essence of the antisemitism of the imperialist bourgeoisie, and also of Zionism as a part of the same imperialist and anti-Semitic ideology:

The conflict between good and evil which proceeds unceasingly in the breast of man nowhere reaches such an intensity as in the Jewish race.
[...]
And it may well be that this same astounding race may at the present time be in the actual process of producing another system of morals and philosophy, as malevolent as Christianity was benevolent, which, if not arrested would shatter irretrievably all that Christianity has rendered possible. It would almost seem as if the gospel of Christ and the gospel of Antichrist were destined to originate among the same people; and that this mystic and mysterious race had been chosen for the supreme manifestations, both of the divine and the diabolical.
[...]
We in Great Britain well know that during the great struggle the influence of what may be called the National Jews in many lands was preponderatingly on the side of the Allies; and in our own Army Jewish soldiers have played a most distinguished part, some rising to the command of armies, others wining the Victoria Cross for valour.
The National Russian Jews, in spite of the disabilities under which they have suffered, have managed to play an honourable and successful part in the national life even of Russia. As bankers and industrialists they have strenuously promoted the development of Russia’s economic resources.
[...]
In violent opposition to all this sphere of Jewish effort rise the schemes of the International Jews. The adherents of this sinister confederacy are mostly men reared up (sic!) among the unhappy populations of countries where Jews are persecuted on account of their race. Most, if not all, of them have forsaken the faith of their forefathers, and divorced from their minds all spiritual hopes of the next world.
This movement among the Jews is not new. From the days of Spartacus-Weishaupt to those of Karl Marx, and down to Trotsky (Russia), Bela Kun (Hungary), Rosa Luxembourg (Germany), and Emma Goldman (United States), this world-wide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilisation and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence, and impossible equality, has been steadily growing.
It played, as a modern writer, Mrs. Webster, has so ably shown, a definitely recognisable part in the tragedy of the French Revolution. It has been the mainspring of every subversive movement during the Nineteenth Century; and now at last this band of extraordinary personalities from the underworld of the great cities of Europe and America have gripped the Russian people by the hair of their heads and have become practically the undisputed masters of that enormous empire.

There is no need to exaggerate the part played in the creation of Bolshevism and the actual bringing about of the Russian Revolution: by these international and for the most part atheistical Jews. It is certainly a very great one; it probably outweighs all others.
[...]
Zionism offers the third sphere to the political conceptions of the Jewish race. In violent contrast to international communism, it presents to the Jew a national idea of a commanding character. It has fallen to the British Government, as a result of the conquest of Palestine, to have the opportunity and the responsibility of securing for the Jewish race all over the world a home and a center of national life.” [Our emphasis – RS]

German “National Socialist” fascism upheld the same idea:

“We must separate Jewry into two categories… the Zionists and those who favor being assimilated. The Zionists adhere to a strict racial position and by emigrating to Palestine they are helping to build their own Jewish state… The time cannot be far distant when Palestine will again be able to accept its sons who have been lost to it for over a thousand years. Our good wishes together with our official good will go with them”. (Reinhardt Heydrich, Chief of the SS Security Service, 1935)

The just and correct proletarian position concerning these “national” and “international” Jews was stated by the great Lenin, and it is still valid today:

“Jewish national culture is the slogan of the rabbis and the bourgeoisie, the slogan of our enemies. But there are other elements in Jewish culture and in Jewish history as a whole. Of the ten and a half million Jews in the world, somewhat over a half live in Galicia and Russia, backward and semi-barbarous countries, where the Jews are forcibly kept in the status of a caste. The other half lives in the civilised world, and there the Jews do not live as a segregated caste. There the great world-progressive features of Jewish culture stand clearly revealed: its internationalism, its identification with the advanced movements of the epoch (the percentage of Jews in the democratic and proletarian movements is everywhere higher than the percentage of Jews among the population).

Whoever, directly or indirectly, puts forward the slogan of Jewish "national culture" is (whatever his good intentions may be) an enemy of the proletariat, a supporter of all that is outmoded and connected with caste among the Jewish people; he is an accomplice of the rabbis and the bourgeoisie. On the other hand, those Jewish Marxists who mingle with the Russian, Lithuanian, Ukrainian and other workers in international Marxist organisations, and make their contribution (both in Russian and in Yiddish) towards creating the international culture of the working-class movement -- those Jews, despite the separatism of the Bund, uphold the best traditions of Jewry by fighting the slogan of ‘national culture’.” (V.I. Lenin – Critical Remarks on the National Question, 1913)

In conclusion we can determine that antisemitism, as well as the whole concept of “races”, was elaborated and spread by the exploiting and reactionary ruling classes of the colonial and imperialist powers, and opposed and combatted principally by the Marxist workers’ movement, the international communist movement. This racism served and continues to serve as an ideological and political tool; 1) as a part of bourgeois nationalism to create communities not based on class, to replace the class struggle with a struggle between “races” or “cultures” and 2) to justify the genocide, exploitation and oppression of the peoples in the colonies/oppressed countries. For German fascism, antisemitism also served as a tool for their hoax of “combatting capitalism and communism” and to justify their war of plunder in Eastern Europe. And, as we shall see, Zionism belongs to this same tradition of chauvinist bourgeois nationalism and racist, anti-Semitic imperialist and colonial ideology.

 

Zionism – a colonial, imperialist and racist ideology

Zionism emerged at the end of the 19th century as a small sect among Jewish bourgeois intellectuals in Europe. Inspired by the chauvinist, colonial and racist nationalism of the bourgeoisie from this era, the founders of Zionism wanted to create a national movement in the same spirit for the Jews, aiming to create a Jewish national state and establish themselves as the ruling class of that state. In order to achieve this goal, they had to establish two ideological concepts:

1) That what the Jews of the world had in common was not only their religion (and certain cultural elements derived from this religious community), but that they were a people, a nation and a “race”.

2) That this “race” descended from the ancient Hebrews, and that they therefore had the right to “return” to the mythical territory of “Israel”.

Just like the myth of the “Aryan race” and other nationalist myths of this era, these two Zionist concepts are ideological inventions without any historical basis. A number of historians and scientific researchers (Jews and others) have already shown a long time ago that the Jews of the world do not have a common origin, but belong to several different groups; some in part descendants from the Middle East, but the majority being descendants of peoples from other parts of the world, who converted to Judaism at different points in history. Schlomo Sand, historian at the University of Tel Aviv, has shown that the European Jews (the Ashkenazi), and among them the founders of Zionism, are mainly descendants of the Khazars, who converted to Judaism in the 8th century, and have nothing to do with the territory of Palestine.

The Zionists knew that to create their “modern” nationalist movement, it had to be a secular movement based on the “race” and the “nation” and not on religion. But, since their nationalist myths had no factual basis, they had to base themselves on the stories of the Old Testament of the Bible and on Christian mythology. In fact, Zionism is more a product of Christianity and Western imperialist ideology than of Judaism.

In Europe, from the late 1800’s to the first few decades of the 1900’s, the racist oppression against the Jews motivated a large part of them to join progressive and revolutionary struggles: “Finding their paths blocked to the centers of high culture—academic careers, free professions, civil service—many became socialist revolutionaries and democratic innovators, and a few became Zionists.” (Sand, Shlomo. The Invention of the Jewish People (p. 252). Verso. Kindle Edition.)

So, the most reactionary and opportunist handful of the Jewish bourgeoisie, the Zionists, decided not to fight against the anti-Semitic reaction, but instead unite with it and take advantage of antisemitism as a means to achieve their own goals. The Zionists heeded the call of Churchill and the other reactionaries to reject and combat the proletarian revolution and to serve imperialism. They adopted the whole pseudo-scientific ideology of the “races”, including antisemitism:

“In other words, just as Germanity at some stage needed abundant Aryanism to define itself, so Polishness needed Catholicism and Russianness needed Orthodox pan-Slavism to swaddle their national identities and imagery. Unlike the Jewish religious reform movement, or the liberal and socialist intellectual groups that sought participation in the emergent national cultures, Zionism borrowed extensively from the dominant nationalist ideologies flourishing in the lands of its birth and infancy, and integrated them into its new platform. It included traces of German Volkism, while Polish romantic nationalist features characterized much of its rhetoric.” (Ibid.)
“The racist pseudoscience that flourished in all of Europe’s laboratories of learning during the imperialist era of the late nineteenth century percolated through ethnocentric nationalism into the central public arenas and became part of the ideological texture of the new political parties. Among them was the young Zionist movement.
[...]
Nathan Birnbaum, perhaps the first Zionist intellectual—it was he who coined the term “Zionism” in 1890—picked up the argument where Hess left off:

You cannot explain a people’s particular mental and emotional distinction except by means of the natural studies. “Race is all,” said our great fellow national Lord Beaconsfield [Benjamin Disraeli]. The distinction of the people stems from the distinction of the race. The variety of races accounts for the great diversity of nations. It is because of the differences between the races that the German or the Slav thinks differently from the Jew. It is this difference which explained why the German created the Song of the Nibelungen and the Jew, the Bible.

[...]
When Houston Stewart Chamberlain published his famous racialist book The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century in 1899, Birnbaum viewed it with understanding, rejecting only the British thinker’s erroneous anti-Semitic position. The Jews were not “a bastard race,” as Chamberlain argued—they had actually preserved their lineage by marrying only among themselves, and they were, moreover, an integral part of the white race. (Ibid.)

Thus we see that all the founders and leaders of Zionism shared the racist ideology of the imperialist bourgeoisies in Europe and North America, and they also considered themselves part of the same “white race” that according to this ideology represented “Western civilization” in struggle against the “inferior races” of the colonies in Asia, Africa etc. Some Zionists even stated the “superiority” of the European Jews (the Ashkenazi) to the Jews of the Middle East:

“’…The result is that in the Jew of to-day, we have what is in some respects a particularly valuable human type. Other nations may have other points of superiority, but in respect of intellectual gifts the Jews can scarcely be surpassed by any nation.
Did all the Jews in the world possess such exceptional mental qualities? The young Ruppin thought they did not, and stressed in a footnote, ‘It is perhaps owing to this severe process of selection that the Ashkenazim are to-day superior in activity, intelligence and scientific capacity to the Sephardim and Arabian Jews, in spite of their common ancestry’.” (Ibid.)

And, since the goal of the Zionists was not to defend the Jews against oppression, but to collaborate with the oppressors to establish themselves as the ruling class of a Jewish national state, it is not so strange that they openly expressed their agreement with antisemitism:

“In Paris, as I have said, I achieved a freer attitude toward anti-Semitism, which I now began to understand historically and to pardon. Above all, I recognized the emptiness and futility of trying to combat anti-Semitism” (Theodor Herzl)

“Each country can absorb only a limited number of Jews, if she doesn’t want disorders in her stomach. Germany already has too many Jews” (Cham Weizmann)

“We too are in agreement with the cultural anti-Semites, in so far as we believe that Germans of the Mosaic faith are an undesirable, demoralizing phenomena” (Cham Weizmann)

“If we do not admit the rightfulness of anti-Semitism, we deny the rightfulness of our own nationalism. If our people is deserving and willing to live its own national life, then it is an alien body thrust into the nations among whom it lives, an alien body that insists on its own distinctive identity, reducing the domain of their life. It is right, therefore, that they should fight against us for their national integrity. Instead of establishing societies for defense against the anti-Semites, who want to reduce our rights, we should establish societies for defense against our friends who desire to defend our rights.” (Jacob Klatzkin)

Then it is also not strange that the Zionists in Germany had a friendly relationship and a direct collaboration with Hitler’s fascist regime, as we shall see in the next part, or that the genocidal Netanyahu a few years ago held a speech defending Hitler, with the shameless lie that the Holocaust was not Hitler’s idea, but a Palestinian’s.

 

Zionism in collaboration with German fascism

During the period before World War II, the Zionists dedicated themselves to establishing good relationships with the ruling classes and their imperialist states. Since the Zionists were no more than a sect of intellectuals who wanted to become colonizers, their whole project depended on convincing one of the imperialist powers to give them the territory and the means to colonize it; preferably the territory of Palestine.

In 1920, with the fall of the Ottoman Empire, Palestine was occupied by the British Empire. Accordingly, the Zionists mainly approached the British imperialists for their project. Churchill said that the creation of a Jewish State in Palestine “would, from every point of view, be beneficial, and would be especially in harmony with the truest interests of the British Empire”, and the Empire began with the establishment of the Jewish settlements and the violent repression of the Palestinian resistance.

In Germany, when the Hitlerite fascists came to power, the Zionists wanted most of all to be accepted by the fascist regime as adherents of the same “racial” world view, declaring their loyalty to the imperialist state and its regime. In 1933 the Zionist Federation of Germany (ZVfD) sent a letter to the Nazi Party:

“May we therefore be permitted to present our views, which, in our opinion, make possible a solution in keeping with the principles of the new German State of National Awakening and which at the same time might signify for Jews a new ordering of the conditions of their existence…
[…]
An answer to the Jewish question truly satisfying to the national state can be brought about only with the collaboration of the Jewish movement that aims at a social, cultural, and moral renewal of Jewry… a rebirth of national life, such as is occurring in German life through adhesion to Christian and national values [under the Nazis!], must also take place in the Jewish national group.
[…]
Fidelity to their own kind and their own culture gives Jews the inner strength that prevents insult to the respect for the national sentiments and the imponderables of German nationality; and rootedness in one’s own spirituality protects the Jew from becoming the rootless critic of the national foundations of German essence.
[…]
The realization of Zionism could only be hurt by resentment of Jews abroad against the German development. Boycott propaganda such as is currently being carried on against Germany in many ways is in essence un-Zionist. (Cohen, Peter – The Capitalist Holocaust)

Therefore, when the non-Zionist Jews and other groups around the world called for a boycott against the fascist regime in Germany, the Zionists rejected the boycott and offered the German regime a way to combat the boycott: “A Zionist businessman in Palestine made the Germans an offer. German Jews would buy German goods in Germany and then export them to Palestine. The buyer would emigrate to Palestine and sell the goods in order to recover the purchase price, minus a percentage that the Nazi government would keep as a commission” (Ibid.).

Then, in May of 1933 the Zionists and the German regime signed a Transfer Agreement to facilitate the export of “Jewish” property from Germany to Palestine, thus undermining the effects of the boycott and facilitating the “ethnic cleansing” of Germany to support the Zionist project in Palestine.

The majority of Jews in the world, and even some Zionists, firmly opposed this collaboration with German fascism, correctly pointing out that for the leaders of Zionism, “the project in Palestine took precedence over the needs of millions of individual Jews world-wide. Such people were nothing more than a ‘reservoir from which they would pick young immigrants to build their state’” (Ibid.) And this was confirmed during the whole period of the German fascist regime and its genocide. The Zionists openly declared that they were not interested in saving Jews from the oppression and genocide in Europe, but only in importing a selection of the “best” Jews to Palestine for the creation of their Zionist state. Chaim Weizmann, the future Prime minister of Israel, said in 1937:

“The old ones will pass; they will bear their fate, or they will not. They are dust, economic and moral dust, in a cruel world… Two millions, and perhaps less… only a branch will survive. They had to accept it. The rest they must leave to the future, to their youth. If they feel and suffer, they will find a way.” (Ibid.)

And the future Prime minister of Israel, David Ben-Gurion:

“If I knew that it would be possible to save all the children in Germany by bringing them over to England, and only half of them by transporting them to Eretz Yisrael, then I would opt for the second alternative. For we must weigh not only the life of these children, but also the destiny of the People of Israel.”(Ibid.)

So the Zionists have never represented, and can never represent, the victims of the Holocaust; they are accomplices in it. Genocide and fascism have been integral parts of their ideology and politics from the beginning.

 

The occupation of Palestine and the creation of the Zionist state

At the end of World War II, the genocide against the Jews in Europe created the conditions for gaining broad international support for the creation of the Zionists state in Palestine. The Zionists took advantage of the situation to promote Zionism as a project of “liberation”, and a large part of the Jews in the world became Zionists. They already had the support of imperialism, mainly Yankee imperialism, which was quickly replacing the British Empire as the biggest imperialist superpower and needed “Israel” as its outpost in the Middle East; a political and military base for combatting and containing the oppressed peoples, in competition and collusion with the other imperialists.

However, in order to secure their “Jewish” state, the Zionists also needed the support of the Soviet Union, a socialist country that had the support of the international proletariat and the peoples, and that also had one of the largest Jewish populations in the world. To get the support of the workers of the world and take advantage of the enormous prestige that the Soviet Union had after the World War, the Zionists fomented and used the so-called “Socialist Zionism” or “Left Zionism”. While they promised the imperialists an “outpost of Western civilization”, the tried to attract the communists and the workers with the promise of a “socialist Israel”. In 1947, a majority in the UN – including the Soviet Union – voted in favor of the creation of the state of Israel.

This decision of the Soviet Union, i.e. of its Communist Party under the leadership of Comrade Stalin, is one of the problems linked to what the Communist Party of Peru has pointed out in its International Line: “For the communists and for our Party, making the evaluation of the Communist International, especially of its 7th Congress, linked to the World War and the role of Comrade Stalin, is an urgent task. In 1943 the International was dissolved and replaced by an Information Committee.” It must be remembered that until this decision in 1947, the Soviet Union had applied a firm anti-Zionist line, supporting the Palestinian resistance against imperialism and Zionism.

So-called “socialist Zionism” or “worker Zionism” dominated the politics of the Zionist state until the 1970’s. This supposed socialism was realized in organizational forms like the Kibbutz and the Moshav, agricultural “communes” or “cooperatives” that in reality were corporatist and fascist organs; instruments for settler colonialism, built on stolen lands. A “socialism” based on the same ideology as the social-fascists and all the contemporary revisionists of the world; the embellishment of imperialism – “Western civilization” – and the continued exploitation and oppression of the oppressed peoples.

The leaders of “socialist Zionism”, among them David Ben-Gurion, immediately started applying the racist and colonialist ideology in practice, with the help of the imperialists:

“David Ben-Gurion, who was determined to secure demographic exclusivity for the Jews in any future state. This was an obsession that not only informed his actions before 1948, but also long after the creation of the state of Israel. As we shall see, this led him in 1948 to orchestrate the ethnic cleansing of Palestine” (Pappe, Ilan. Ten Myths About Israel)

And the Zionists established the methods for this ethnic cleansing:

“Demolitions of the homes of imprisoned or executed rebels, or of presumed rebels or their relatives, was routine, another tactic borrowed from the British playbook developed in Ireland.60 Two other imperial practices employed extensively in repressing the Palestinians were the detention of thousands without trial and the exile of troublesome leaders.” (Khalidi, Rashid. The Hundred Years' War on Palestine)
“In a matter of seven months, 531 villages were destroyed and eleven urban neighborhoods emptied. The mass expulsion was accompanied by massacres, rape, and the imprisonment of males over the age of ten in labor camps for periods of over a year.” (Pappe, Ilan. Ten Myths About Israel)

Thus began what in Arabic is called the “Nakba” (The Catastrophe) that is the genocide, displacement and oppression of the Palestinian people by the Zionist state, which has now been going on for 76 years and is carried out with the full economic, political and military support of imperialism, mainly Yankee.

 

The Palestinian struggle for national liberation and the class struggle

With the realization of the Zionist project, the Palestinian nation was excluded from the so-called process of “de-colonization” after World War II, through which some of the colonies liberated themselves from direct colonial control, gaining their formal independence but in reality turning themselves into semi-colonies under the continued imperialist exploitation and oppression. In Palestine however, the imperialists decided to apply the same old form of direct and open settler colonialism that they had applied in the Americas, in South Africa, etc.

The Palestinian national movement emerged as a part of the Arab nationalism of the era, but under the specific conditions of Zionist colonization. And just as in all the oppressed countries, the national liberation movement of Palestine since the beginning has developed inextricably linked to the class struggle, in the midst of the struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie for the leadership of the movement. The struggle for proletarian leadership was undermined and delayed because of the problem of the decision of the Soviet Union mentioned above, and because of the dark role of revisionism and “socialist Zionism”.

In 1967 the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) was founded, which under the influence of socialist China and Mao Tse-tung Thought committed to carry out the Palestinian struggle as a people’s war against imperialism and Zionism, but at the same time it collaborated with Soviet social-imperialism, which wanted to use the Palestinian struggle as a pawn in the interimperialist conflict with Yankee imperialism. In the autobiography of Leila Khaled, combatant of the PFLP, we find the following comments:

“The supreme objective of the Palestine liberation movement is the total liberation of Palestine, the dismantlement of the Zionist state apparatus, and the construction of a socialist society in which both Arabs and Jews can live in peace and harmony. To achieve our objective we have adopted the strategy of people’s war and protracted armed struggle.”

“The aim of the Soviet Union is the neutralization of the US and its eventual expulsion from the Middle East. As an advocate of co-existence, the peaceful transition to socialism, and the non-capitalist road to development, the USSR supports the ‘Arab national regimes’ in their antiimperialist struggle, provides them with loans for industrial projects, and weapons to fight the Israeli conquerors. As a sponsor of the ‘political solution’, the Soviet Union recognizes the legitimacy of Israel, respects its sovereignty […] The Soviet Union is a champion of ‘peace and co-existence’, not of people’s war and revolutionary violence.” (Leila Khaled – My People Shall Live – The Autobiography of a Revolutionary, edited by George Hajjar, 1973)

The Palestinian bourgeoisie on the other hand, has two aspects; one antiimperialist aspect, of struggling against imperialism and Zionism, and one country-selling aspect, of collaborating with them. Imperialism and the Zionists apply the policy of collaboration with the Palestinian bureaucratic and/or comprador bourgeoisie in order to contain and undermine the national liberation movement, and the policy of genocide and repression against the Palestinian revolutionary forces. All the “peace accords” imposed by imperialism have been realized through the full collaboration of the Palestinian bourgeoisie, today represented by the “Palestinian Authority” led by Fatah:

"The PA’s core responsibilities, as seen by its Israeli, American, and European sponsors, involved preventing violence against Israelis and security cooperation with Israel.
[...]
The ongoing war on Gaza, which included major Israeli ground offensives in 2008–9, 2012, and 2014, was combined with regular Israeli military incursions into Palestinian areas of the West Bank and East Jerusalem. These involved arrests and assassinations, the demolition of homes, and the suppression of the population, all of which took place with the quiet collusion of the Fatah-run PA in Ramallah. These events confirmed that the PA was a body with no sovereignty and no real authority except that allowed it by Israel, as it collaborated in quashing protests in the West Bank while Israel pounded Gaza."

Also, the role of Hamas must be understood in this context. The rise of Hamas is linked to the policy of Yankee imperialism – applied in Palestine by the Zionist state – of fomenting the Islamist movements in the Arab world to use as pawns and to replace or combat the proletarian movements. The problem with this policy, in Palestine as well as in other places – is that these Islamist groups also have an antiimperialist aspect, and base themselves on the support of the broad masses, which are principally anti-imperialist and anti-Zionist.

“Hamas was begun in Gaza by militants who felt that the Brotherhood had been too accommodating toward the Israeli occupier in return for lenient treatment. Indeed, in the first two decades of the occupation, when the military authorities severely repressed all other Palestinian political, social, cultural, professional, and academic groups, they had allowed the Brotherhood to operate freely. Because of its utility to the occupation in splitting the Palestinian national movement, Israeli indulgence of the Brotherhood was extended to Hamas […]” (Ibid.)

As we now see, Hamas – because of its important role in the just and heroic armed actions against the occupation – became the main enemy of the Zionists. The Chairman of the PFLP, Ahmad Sa’adat, stated in 2005: “The left and the Islamists are both for the struggle against imperialism. Therefore it is possible to build a united front with the Islamists”.

In conclusion, the heroic and invincible struggle of the Palestinian people continues to advance, and its main and most advanced form is that of the armed actions against imperialism and the Zionist state; armed actions that are just and serve the world revolution, regardless of whether they now are led by proletarian or bourgeois and religious organizations. However, the whole history and the present of the Palestinian struggle confirm that the organized proletariat is the only class capable of leading the national liberation struggle and carry it out until its end, and that the struggle against revisionism is decisive in order to be able to forge the proletarian leadership that is needed. In Palestine as well as in all other countries, the proletariat urgently has to build its Communist Party as a Party of the new type, a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist and militarized Party, in order to lead the united front as a front of all the classes of the people and develop the people’s war until the conquest of power in the whole Palestinian territory, from the river to the sea.