Rebuild and step up the international movement against the oppression of the Palestinians and imperialist warmongering!
Millions around the world gasped in horror as news reports of a White House press conference filtered through. A few short months after winning re-election on the promise of “making peace” in the world, Donald Trump had spoken, flanked by a smirking mass murderer (Bibi Netanyahu) who could hardly hold back his glee.
Trump announced to the world a new policy, unprecedented in the bloody history of US imperialism in the Middle East: the US would “take over” and “own” the Gaza strip, ethnically cleanse it of Palestinian people and transform it into a beautiful “Riviera.”
This followed a summit with Netanyahu, the first foreign head of state to be invited to Trump 2.0’s White House. While Trump’s disgusting comments on Gaza grabbed the headlines, they were only one part of a consistent package of announcements and declarations over the course of the day. Minutes after openly advocating the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, Trump promised to make a new announcement soon concerning the Israeli state’s alleged “biblical right” to annex the West Bank. Moments earlier, he had signed a new executive order reinstating a policy of “maximum pressure” on Iran, accompanied by threats to obliterate it.
These developments underline the urgency of maintaining, rebuilding and escalating the international movement against the oppression of the Palestinians, and imperialist warmongering.
Trump and Netanyahu’s dystopian new “balance of power”
Ordinary people throughout the world celebrated the announcement of January’s Gaza ceasefire after a year and a half of genocidal war. However, socialists explained from the beginning that this was no solution. In the White House, Trump and Netanyahu could barely keep straight faces when asked if they thought the ceasefire would hold, with the latter simply repeating his determination to pursue his unachievable “war aims”, including the dismantling of Hamas.
The ceasefire was brought about by a number of factors, including mass pressure from within Israeli society for the release of hostages and pressure from Trump’s pre-administration, keen for a trophy announcement to accompany his inauguration. However, it also reflected the changed balance of power in the region, following the relative failure of the Iran-led “axis” after defeats in Syria and Lebanon.
In this scenario, the idea of Israeli capitalism simply sitting back and suing for peace is fanciful. What we are now witnessing, including in Trump’s declarations, is the beginning of a push to change the “balance of power” in the region in a more qualitative way, with an emboldened government of death in Israel, increasingly led by an aggressive administration in Washington.
What does this new balance of power look like? While Trump portrayed confidence in his Gaza plan coming to fruition, dismissing the rebuttals of the reactionary Arab regimes he hopes will house displaced Gazan residents, making this a reality in the short term is highly unlikely. Despite its weakening, Hamas and other forces are still in place in the strip, and any attempt to “clear it out” as Trump advocates, would result in an unspeakably bloody quagmire for US imperialism (despite Trump’s claims to have learned the lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan!). The masses of the region, and the world, would also be incensed, a thought which no doubt fills the Egyptian, Saudi, Jordanian and other regimes with dread.
However, what Trump’s statements amount to, taken together with his administration’s seemingly open embrace of the idea of West Bank annexation, is a significant change. Trump and Netanyahu want to bury the idea of Palestinian statehood once and for all under the rubble of the genocidal war. They want to make the cause of Palestinian liberation a mere memory in the region, paving the way for the Israeli occupation’s full normalization, and the Iranian regime’s full isolation, if not overthrow.
Ultimately, they will achieve none of these goals. But they are more than capable of pushing the region into more bloody conflagrations in their attempts to do so. Far from the beginning of a new period of peace, this is a moment of great danger.
A continuation of imperialism’s blood-soaked legacy — revolutionary change needed
While Trump’s new announcements are unprecedented, they did not fall like a bolt from a clear blue sky. They are a continuation of US and Western imperialism’s policy in the Middle East since 1948, based on fundamental support for the Israeli state’s oppression of the Palestinian people.
Many of the bourgeois liberal politicians (and journalists) who are expressing outrage over Trump’s comments on Gaza have blood on their own hands for supporting a year and a half of genocidal onslaught. Keir Starmer’s full-throated defence of “Israel’s right” to murder and starve Gazans will not be forgotten, nor will the “unreserved solidarity” of Macron for Netanyahu, nor the fundamentally identical pro-slaughter positions of Scholtz, Trudeau and the rest.
Indeed, this is yet another chapter of imperialism’s historic role throughout the region, where war after war has resulted from the pretensions of British, US, French and other corporations to dominate resources, wealth and power.
On the other side of the global imperialist bloc conflict, Chinese imperialism is of course attempting to capitalize on the rejection of the openly murderous policy of its American rival to shore up its own position in the Middle East and wider “global south”. Its government came out quickly, together with Iran, Turkey and Saudi Arabian regimes in condemning Trump’s comments.
But the aims and objectives of Chinese imperialism and its allies are fundamentally no less ugly in this new era of imperialist conflict and war. It is backing Russian imperialism in another brutal war which is throwing Trump’s peacemaking credentials into the dustbin of history — the imperialist proxy-conflict in Ukraine.
The bloody dog fight among capitalists and imperialists to carve up the world, its people and wealth, threatens to drag humanity through rivers of blood in this new era. Working class people around the world, in the Middle East as well as the imperialist West and East, must organize against war and militarism. Mass protests against war should be stepped up, embracing the methods of direct mass working class action to shut down the war machine of arms production and shipping. New mass parties of the working class must be built to clearly oppose war, the arms race and all imperialist interests.
A revolutionary alternative of socialist change, where the key sectors of the economy and key resources are held under public, democratic ownership and control, is the only basis upon which national rights can be respected, and wars ended. ISA fights for this program around the world, join our fight today!
