“A slave-owner who through cunning and violence shackles a slave in chains, and a slave who through cunning or violence breaks the chains – let not the contemptible eunuchs tell us that they are equals before a court of morality!” ― Leon Trotsky, Their Morals and Ours

Netanyahu holds up a map without Palestine during UN speech, 22-9-23

Alexander Ulyanov

When Lenin was 17 in 1887 his brother, 21-year-old Alexander Ulyanov, was hanged for attempting to assassinate the Tsar. This was the event that made Lenin a revolutionary. He disagreed with his brother’s anarchism never ‘condemned’ him because he understood the progressive motivations behind this individual terror act. Later he came to see the necessity for replacing individual terror with mass terror, that of the risen masses. He succeeded brilliantly in October 1917, storming the Winter Place was the greatest ever revolutionary act of human liberation. Only Trotskyism today defends that heritage against Stalinism’s  two stage revolutions, socialism in a single country, defending world revolution; Permeant (uninterrupted) Revolution in the semi-colonial lands.

Similarly we do not ‘condemn’ the excesses of Nat Turner’s 1831 slave uprising in Virginia, killing nearly 60 white people, mostly women and children. Or the Algerian FLN or the Mau Mau in Kenya despite their excesses. Or IRA acts of individual terror, like the Birmingham, Omagh and Enniskillen bombings. Because we recognise all their progressive motivations fighting slavery and imperialism. 

But in many instances there is ample circumstantial evidence that the MI5 and other state agencies knew what was in train, as may also be the case with the CIA/FBI and 9/11, and allowed them to go ahead, because they knew the great political damage mass civilian casualties would do to the cause of anti-imperialism in Britain, the US and Israel today. Suggestions that this was the case with the Hamas attack seem unlikely given Netanyahu’s humiliation by Hamas’ success but it’s possible—Egypt says it gave a warning.

   Of course the Hamas outrages alienated their potential Jewish supporters in Israel and internationally as the IRA bombings in Britain did to potential supporters in the British, and particularly the English, working class. In periods in the early 1920s the support for the IRA in the ranks of the working class was very substantial because of the Triple Alliance and revulsion against the crimes of the Black and Tans in Ireland.  During the great miners’ strike of 1984-5 there was big support against Thatcher after the hunger strikes of 1981. Its ‘patriotic’ reformist leaders in the trade unions and Labour party worked might and main to thwart that joint struggle against British imperialism, as they do today for Apartheid Israel and the similarly fascist-infested US/Nato proxy regime in Ukraine.

We will not ‘condemn’ Hamas

The Al-Aqsa Mosque crisis in April inflamed the whole conflict with 400 arrested. So today we will not ‘condemn’ Hamas for its invasion of southern Israel or for its reactionary acts like the mass shooting of the 260 ravers at the Supernova festival and the Kfar Aza kibbutz, all are provocatively just three miles from the Gaza concentration camp.

The IRA too committed similar appalling acts, like the Kingsmill massacre of ten Protestant workers on 5 January 1976. Such outrages are small compared to the oppression and murders committed by state-sponsored neo-Nazis on the nationalist community since the early 20th century or Israel’s on the Palestinians for 70-80 years. The Glenanne gang, which consisted of British soldiers from the UDR, police officers from the RUC, and members of the Mid-Ulster Brigade of the UVF assassinated some 200 random Catholic civilians in the 1970s and 80s. The Orange Order supremacists have always followed this pattern.

In July 1946 the fascistic militias Irgun and Stern Gang bombed the King David hotel, killing 91. In the 1948 Nakba they drove at least 750,000 Palestinians from their homes and lands, killing over 15,000 and stole 78% of historic Palestine. They razed 530 villages including Deir Yassin in which they slaughtered 107 men, woman and children. Yanis Varoufakis, leader of left Greek European Realistic Disobedience Front states correctly:

“Socialists should be crystal clear. Palestinians have every right, after a siege of Gaza lasting over 17 years, to resist their oppressors. Anyone who denies that is no supporter of the Palestinians.”

And Tony Greenstein, a Jew whose father was Rabbi Solomon Greenstein, also correctly writes:

“It is perfectly possible to condemn rape, the alleged parading of a naked Israeli woman in Gaza City and yet support the Palestinian Uprising. Because we all know that whatever war crimes have been committed by Palestinian fighters they pale into insignificance compared to the endless Israeli atrocities. The violence of the oppressed can never be compared with the violence of the oppressor.”

According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, in conflicts since 2008, there has been 6,407 fatalities on the Palestinian side compared to 308 Israeli (20+ to 1) and 152,560 Palestinian injuries compared to 6,307 Israeli (24+ to 1). But in the present conflict on 10-10 Israel counted  900 dead and only 794 Palestinian fatalities, the first time there was such an imbalance. But by 15-10 Israel had 1,400 dead but Gaza had 2,600, including 724 children and 458 women, with an unknown number still under inaccessible ruins.

A New Warsaw Ghetto uprising looming

Netanyahu has not only evened up the score but is determined to restore the previous imbalance. The Gaza population cannot escape the bombardment. Israel has launched three air strikes near the Rafah crossing between Gaza and Egypt, and warns Egypt not to open it. With his order on 1.5 million to evacuate the north of Gaza in 24 hours This signalled genocide intent similar to the Nazi Holocaust. Shades of the 19 April 1943 Warsaw Ghetto uprising when SS-Brigadeführer Stroop ordered the destruction of the Ghetto, block by block. He murdered 13,000 by 16 May and the Holocaust followed, as another may in Gaza.

Gaza is now facing total  destruction in horrendous Israeli genocidal war crimes

Tony Greenstein writes:

“Netanyahu has already promised, as if a Nazi General, to raze Gaza to the ground. Yoav Gallant, Israel’s Defence Minister has already called the Palestinians ‘human animals’ thus betraying the racist nature of Zionism and its treatment of the Palestinians… In 2015 Deputy Defence Minister Eli Dahan also called Palestinians ‘animals’”.

Adolf Hitler and Alfred Rosenberg dehumanised  Jews as “human animals” to prepare the Holocaust. Gallant  said “We are fighting human animals and we act accordingly… We are imposing a complete siege on Gaza. There will be no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel. Everything will be closed.” By 11-10 Gaza’s main generator had run out of fuel. Hospital generators are now almost dry too. Tory MP Crispin Blunt today denounces the war crimes of both Israel and western leaders who endorse them. Gerald Kaufman, a Jew, also who denounced these terrible war crimes in 2009.

Germany, Austria, Hungary and the EU executive proposed stopping all funding for Gaza but objections from Spain, Ireland and Switzerland forced a partial withdrawal. The three countries have stopped their own aid.

According to the liberal Israeli newspaper Haaretz on 16 January, 2023 Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s far-right Finance Minister, said he is, “a fascist homophobe” but “won’t stone gays” although if he did so, “my voters would still support me”. Israel’s Police Minister Itamar Ben Gvir admits to having a poster of Baruch Goldstein on his living room wall. On 25 February 1994 Goldstein shot dead 29 worshippers and injured nearly a hundred in the Ibrahimi Mosque or Cave of the Patriarchs massacre, before he was overpowered and beaten to death. Goldstein was a member of the far-right Kach movement, now banned as a terrorist organisation by Israeli. Many extremists call Goldstein a “martyr”, raising the question why the ‘Unity government’ still has fascists in government. Gallant is in he War Cabinet with Netanyahu and Gantz. In May the Guardian wrote:

“Thousands of Israeli nationalists, some of them chanting racist slogans, have paraded through Jerusalem’s Old City in an annual celebratory day for Israelis that became one of humiliation for Palestinians living under occupation. They were celebrating Israel’s capture of East Jerusalem in 1967. The crowd waved blue and white Israeli flags and chanted slogans such as “Death to Arabs” and “We will burn your village”.

On the West Bank illegal settlers, protected by the IDF,  now murders, steals land and demolished the homes of the Palestinians. The UN reported on 28-3-23:

“The Human Rights Council this afternoon heard the presentation of a report by the High Commissioner for Human Rights which stated that the current Israeli plan to double the settler population in the occupied Syrian Golan Heights by 2027 was unprecedented, and that 700,000 Israeli settlers are living illegally in the occupied West Bank.”

Let us hear no more bullshit about the Hamas raid being “unprovoked”. You could scarcely get greater provocation than those outlined above. But Israel is the US aircraft carrier in the Middle East. Its Fifth and Sixth Fleets are now in the region. According to the Congressional Research Services U.S. Foreign Aid to Israel, 1 March, 2023:

“Israel is the largest cumulative recipient of U.S. foreign assistance since World War II… To date, the United States has provided Israel $158 billion in bilateral assistance and missile defence funding. At present, almost all U.S. bilateral aid to Israel is in the form of military assistance; from 1971 to 2007, Israel also received significant economic assistance.”

Of course all the pro-Israel lobbies like the Board of Deputies and the Campaign Against Antisemitism and others brand Hamas “anti-Semitic”. They used this weapon to topple Jeremy Corbyn, who cowardly capitulated to the onslaught by Labour’s right wing and the British establishment mass media by expelling his own strongest supporters.

A multi-ethnic workers’ state

We still stand by our political line on 10/04/2016, Socialist Fight Statement on anti-Semitism and the Jewish Question:

“On Hamas we say: “Although Hamas is potentially no less reactionary and more so on social issues than the PA (Palestinian Authority) nevertheless it is fighting Israel now. It expresses the anger of the oppressed, in a very distorted way it is true, so it deserves unconditional but critical support against Israel right now. On the governmental slogans we say that the only progressive outcome of the conflict in the region is; “Socialist Fight stands for a multi-ethnic workers’ state in Occupied Palestine/Israel and is totally opposed to a two state solution. We are for the destruction of the settler-colonial state of Israel and for a Multi-ethnic Workers’ State of Palestine in a Socialist Federation of the Middle East.”▲