The ceasefire in Gaza marks a humiliating defeat of both the Zionist regime as well as its US and British imperialist masters. The Palestinian people’s steadfast refusal to be expelled from their land and allow the Israelis to carry out their much desired second Nakba must act as an inspiration to those of us in the imperial core nations. For over 15 months the Zionist regime relentlessly bombarded the people of Gaza, destroyed homes and killed hundreds of thousands. For all the horrors that have been inflicted upon them, the people of Gaza continued to resist the Zionist forces and, even though the latter had the full backing of US and British imperialism, the Israeli regime could not beat the resistance. The Israeli regime failed in their stated aims of eliminating Hamas and in the end were forced, when they realised that they could not win the battle, to accept a ceasefire that they swore they would never do.
A protracted war of liberation
The war waged by the Zionist regime has now seen them fail in their war on Lebanon. Despite their assassination of the Hezbollah leadership and their terrorist attacks against civilians they were unable to advance more than a few kilometres into Lebanon itself. As with the war of 2006, the Zionist army revealed itself to be unable to defeat the forces of Hezbollah. This defeat came about owing to the extraordinary courage of the Lebanese fighters based on the fact that they have an incredibly strong relationship with the Lebanese masses. In the case of Gaza too, the strength of the fighters and their ability to defeat the forces of the Zionist regime is rooted in their very close integration within the Palestinian masses. Where there is such a strong connection between liberation fighters and the people, it is exceptionally difficult for the imperialists to defeat such a movement. This was proved in the great liberation wars waged by colonised peoples in Korea, Algeria, Zimbabwe and Vietnam.
“All the experience of the ten months of war proves the error both of the theory of China’s inevitable subjugation and of the theory of China’s quick victory. The former gives rise to the tendency to compromise and the latter to the tendency to underestimate the enemy. Both approaches to the problem are subjective and one-sided, or, in a word, unscientific”. – Mao Zedong On Protracted War.
The words of Chairman Mao are particularly apt in this situation. What is being waged in Gaza and the wider Middle East is, in effect, a protracted war of liberation. The war in Gaza proved that the Israeli army cannot effectively fight a popular resistance movement which is able to negate many of the advantages that imperialist armies possess such as such as heavy armour, drone technology, artillery and air power. Such technology is capable of destroying many buildings and killing many people but it does not appear to have damaged the resistance forces’ ability to inflict significant casualties on the Israeli enemy.
Although the Zionist regime has been forced to retreat, it remains a dangerous enemy capable of doing great damage. The massive level of civilian casualties caused in the war on Gaza is truly horrific but is typical of the way the imperialist powers wage war against resistance movements. The French imperialists killed up 45,000 Algerians in six weeks from May to June 1945 in response to the first stirrings of the Algerian independence movement; the British imperialists committed a series of grisly brutalities against the Kenyan people in the 1950s, killing 20,000 and executing over 1,000 who had surrendered; and in Malaya the British forces were exposed by the Daily Worker as having committed a vast number of war crimes including mass executions, torture and beheadings. The tactics of imperialism are always the same when a resistance movement is embedded within the masses: they aim to terrorise the civilian population to the point where they give up support for the resistance movements. In the case of Algeria this proved to be a disastrous failure for the French imperialists who, despite killing over a million Algerians, still lost the war and were obliged to concede independence. The defeat of the Israeli regime certainly opens up new possibilities for resistance but this is clearly going to be a protracted struggle that will see periods of war interspersed with periods of unstable peace. The Palestinian struggle is primarily about the liberation of their land from imperialist control with the Zionists acting as imperialism’s agents. The wider struggle, as the late Hezbollah General Secretary Hassan Nasrallah observed, is about the removal of imperialist influence from the entire region. The imperialists themselves understand this and this is why they have supported the Israeli regime all the way through 15 months of genocide. For the US and British imperialists this is about keeping their boot on the throat of all the masses in West Asia. This is why the entire NATO war machine has supported the Israeli regime and why the British government allows the US to fly supplies to the Zionist state through British air bases.
Heroism of Yemen
The heroic role of the Yemeni government and people must be noted here. Despite over a decade of war being waged on them by the repulsive Saudi regime on behalf of their masters in London and Washington, the Yemenis did not hesitate to join the struggle of the Palestinians. From 19 October 2023, the Yemenis enforced a blockade on trade with Israel which proved so effective that the port of Eilat was pushed into bankruptcy, leading to a further crisis of the Israeli economy. The Yemenis also pulled off several audacious attacks using domestically-produced hypersonic missiles against the interior of the Zionist state itself, displaying capabilities for which the imperialists were totally unprepared. The US responded by attempting to bomb Yemen into submission, but this has proved to be an utter failure. After over a decade of war being waged on them by the US and their Saudi stooge regime, the Yemeni masses have become battle hardened to the point where the attempt to use ‘shock and awe’ tactics on them simply did not work. After over a year of running the ludicrously entitled ‘Operation Prosperity Guardian’, the US and British navies were unable to stop Yemeni operations against merchant shipping bound for Israel. The much-vaunted US navy was revealed to be utterly impotent when confronted with a people steeled in their long fight for independence from neo-colonial domination.
Treachery of the comprador regimes
Now the US imperialists are moving to new schemes to try and defeat the heroic Palestinian people, US President Trump is talking of ‘buying’ Gaza and evicting the Palestinian people from it. This should be seen for what it is – a desperate attempt to cover up the defeat of the Zionist regime by making threats. The Palestinian people’s struggle continues and will not cease until they have secured all that was stolen from them by US and British imperialism over the course of the last century.
In making these crude threats of genocide Trump is playing his usual role in that he openly and thuggishly makes threats that the likes of Biden would only make in private. It was the Biden gang’s policy, immediately after the launch of Operation Al Aqsa Flood, to arrange for the mass expulsion of the Palestinians of Gaza to Egypt or Jordan. This revolting policy was defeated by the resistance of the masses themselves. Even the comprador regimes of Jordan and Egypt balked at this idea. This is not because the Sandhurst graduate King Abdallah or the squalid military regime that runs Egypt have suddenly become supporters of the Palestinian cause. They opposed Biden’s plan because they feared the response of their own populations if they were seen to be collaborating with the genocide in such an open fashion. There were huge demonstrations in Amman in support of the Palestinian resistance which clearly had an impact on the decisions of the regime. These comprador regimes are equally crucial to the maintenance of the power of US imperialism in the region. As the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine observed in their original programme ‘Strategy for the Liberation of Palestine’:
“Arab capitalism, whose interests are represented and defended by reactionary regimes in the Arab world, does not constitute an independent capitalist unit and is consequently unable to assume independent political positions” (PFLP 1968).
Fifty-seven years later and this observation still holds true. The reactionary Arab regimes might hesitate before openly collaborating with the most repellent crimes of Israel but they are still loyal servants of imperialism just as it was set up to be, in the case of Jordan, or has become since the sell-out of Sadat, in the case of Egypt.
The House of Saud, long time collaborators with US and British imperialism, was intelligent enough to not continue openly the normalisation process with the Zionist regime during the time of the Gaza war. Nevertheless what is happening now is tending to bring out into the open what has been the unacknowledged truth for many decades, i.e., that the Saudi autocrats have been allied to the Zionists via the allegiance of both the Saudi ruling clique and the Zionists to US imperialism.
The other key ally of US imperialism in the region is the Turkish regime headed by President Erdogan. The latter has been playing a deeply cynical double game over the Palestinian struggle for three decades now. During the early part of the Gaza war, Erdogan led vast demonstrations declaring solidarity with the Palestinian struggle. Yet at the same time his government continued to ensure that Azerbaijani oil reached Israel via Turkey. Had this oil supply been cut off, then the Israeli regime would have faced even greater trouble and may have been forced to sue for peace earlier. For all his posturing and preaching about Islamic brotherhood, Erdogan has proved time and time again that he is a loyal servant of the US imperialists. They may fall out from time to time, and Erdogan may make overtures to the BRICS states, but Turkey remains a solid NATO ally, and the US influence over the Turkish state machine remains very strong. It must also be remembered that the Turkish regime played a crucial role in the war on Syria, and the HTS group that now holds power in Damascus is run by Turkish military intelligence in collaboration with the US and British imperialists.
The power of US and British imperialism in the West Asian region depends both upon the maintenance of the Zionist state and their relationships with these comprador regimes. These regimes may well be nervous of being seen to collaborate too closely with the Zionists but they are incapable of playing a progressive role and are certainly actively hostile to the national liberation struggle in Palestine for fear that, should the Zionist regime be defeated, then the masses in their own nations may be inspired to rise against them.
The power of imperialism in the region is dependent upon keeping the Arab masses divided into multiple smaller states which can be more easily controlled by the US and Europeans. The Zionist regime remains central to this as its presence acts as a permanent US beachhead in the eastern Mediterranean. The Zonists are also tasked with being the first to act against local resistance forces.
The long war
The failure of the Zionists to defeat the resistance forces in Gaza represents the latest phase in an ongoing struggle. Liberation for the Palestinian people will only come once the Zionist regime is forced to the point of total collapse. The war of the last 15 months has taken it further towards this point but it is inevitable that the US imperialists will try to recover their position in the region and try to revitalise the crisis-riddled Zionist state. The crisis in the Israeli regime stretches back long before the launch of Operation Al Aqsa Flood, and the figure of Netanyahu is central to it, but his removal would by no means solve the contradictions that are mounting up. In fact if he is removed from power there is every chance that the political crisis facing the regime would intensify.
The divisions within the Zionist state are deep rooted and stem from the inability of successive governments actually to stabilise the colonial project. Israeli politics have been becoming ever more openly fascistic since the 1990s and have seen the elevation of open supporters of fascism such as Itmar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich to high positions in Netanyahu’s latest cabinet. The growth in support for fascists and rabid religious fanatics has been occurring for many decades now in Israel as the Zionist project seeks to find more and more settlers to fuel the expansionist dreams of its rulers. This has led to greater divisions springing up between the settler political parties and the more secular liberals who are descended from the European settlers of the earlier period. It must be emphasised that both of these factions were fully supportive of the genocide being committed against the Palestinians, their differences are related to the kind of internal regime the Zionist state should be governed by. This division was expressed during the Gaza war, particularly as the demand for a deal over the release of the prisoners of war taken by the Palestinian resistance forces grew in strength and as the war more obviously became unwinnable. Now the Israeli regime has been revealed as weak, divided, economically damaged and vulnerable to attack from Iran. The disaster overseen by Netanyahu will only exacerbate all these contradictions and further destabilise the regime.
The imperial core
Ever since the start of the Zionist regime’s attempt to destroy the Palestinian people’s very existence via the genocidal war on Gaza, millions of workers in the US imperialist bloc have been moved to protest against it. In Britain, millions of workers have attended demonstrations in solidarity with the Palestinian people’s liberation struggle. The British ruling class has clearly been rattled by these demonstrations as it has resorted to ever more crude attempts at repression. This makes the task of anti-imperialists in the US imperialist bloc ever more important. The mass mobilisations against the genocide have been a hugely important starting point but the movement must evolve now to focus on the structures that have enabled the Zionist regime’s crimes.
This means we must take the following demands into the movement and the wider working class in order to intensify this struggle. It is in the interests of the workers in the imperial core nations to ensure that the ability of “our” ruling class to engage in imperialist adventures abroad, committing and supporting war crimes at will, is obstructed and thus its room for manoeuvre domestically is also damaged. The US military infrastructure across Britain and Europe is the key to supplying the Zionist regime with the munitions it uses and this is yet another reason why we must demand that the US military presence be entirely removed. Every base must be shuttered and all US personnel must be sent packing. Beyond that though we must also demand that the NATO military machine, which has been mobilised to defend the Zionist regime, be dismantled. This alliance is one that is designed to support US wars of aggression all over the world and it too must be shut down. The masses of Britain and all the European nations must join together with our Palestinian brothers and sisters in demanding the imperialists and their Zionist agents get out of the Middle East and end the century of oppression the Arab masses have endured.
Demands the Palestine solidarity movement should make to the government
Remove the recognition of Israel as a legitimate nation
Close the Israeli embassy and eject its diplomatic staff from Britain
Remove all Zionist organisations from Britain
Ensure that all Israeli citizens connected to the genocide are prosecuted for their crimes
Remove all Israeli companies and seize all their assets
Remove all Israeli and Zionist funding of British institutions and individuals
Remove from office any MP who has received funding from the Zionists and hold by-elections for their seats
End all political, diplomatic, cultural ties with Israel
End military supplies, support and collaboration with the Israeli state.
Sanctions on any nation, state or individual trading with the genocidal Zionist regime.
These are not demands that will be granted willingly by the government of imperialist Britain. Nevertheless they are basic democratic demands, especially in the light of the genocide that we have been witnessing of the Palestinian people. Therefore it is essential that any pro-Palestinian organisations in this country, starting with the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, focus their work on convincing the working class to back their demands with actions damaging to imperialist economic interests and hamper their freedom of action, such as strikes and refusals to cooperate in any way with war crimes.
It is high time that British workers became aware that they have it in their power to restrain the warmongering ruling class, after which they can go on and exercise their power in order to remove it altogether.
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