The Israeli assault on Lebanon in July and early August is one more by-product of the increasing disorder of the world capitalist system. The sharpest consequences for imperialism are today in the Middle East and Central Asia. Washington’s response has been the launching of what it calls “the long war.”

Since 2001 the U.S. rulers have toppled governments in Afghanistan and Iraq, and are stepping up threats and pressures against Iran and Syria. Israel’s aggression in Lebanon is one front in these broader, ongoing wars. The unpreparedness of Tel Aviv’s armed forces command, and the outcome of this initial battle of a war that has only begun, has brought on a political crisis in Israel, as the capitalist rulers accelerate the transformation of their active-duty units and reserves to fight more effectively next time.

In past Israeli wars and major policing operations, groups of army reservists have issued petitions protesting Tel Aviv’s brutality toward Palestinians and residents of surrounding Arab countries. This time, a protest petition signed by hundreds of reservists was of a different character: “The blunders of the past six years and the underpreparation of the army have been carried on our backs—the backs of the fighters,” they wrote to Defense Minister Amir Peretz and Chief of Staff Dan Halutz. “In order to face the next battle prepared—and this may happen soon—a thorough and fundamental change must take place…. We will all attend calls to enlist in the future for any mission we will be required to complete, but we would like to know that these missions will be part of a clear objective and will be carried out by striving to engage in combat.”

The Militant is running this excerpt from the 2006 report to help clarify the issues at stake. Portions of it were quoted in a letter by Barnes published in last week’s issue (“‘We are for whatever strengthens the confidence and capacities of the toilers’: Letter from SWP leader on Israel’s murderous war on Lebanon”).

Copyright © 2006 by New International. Reprinted by permission. Subheadings and footnotes are by the Militant. Footnotes appear on page 8.
 

Meanwhile, the Palestinian population in the territories under Tel Aviv’s control has grown to 5 million. That’s just shy of a majority.

Acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has declared, as Ariel Sharon and other leaders of the state and army in Israel had done previously, that Tel Aviv’s goal, above all, must be to “ensure a Jewish majority in the country.” Last year when Olmert, then deputy prime minister, spoke to some 250 new immigrants from the United States who were opposed to the Israeli government’s withdrawal from Gaza, he told them: “Maybe if you or a few million of you had come earlier, we wouldn’t have had to leave Gaza.” But that never happened and was never going to. Now it’s clear it never will.

Withdrawing from Gaza and from much of the occupied territory on the West Bank is reaching near consensus status within the ruling class of Israel.  
 
Not the ‘promised land’
Of course, the imperialist United States will not be “the promised land” for Jews forever. The next great social crisis will settle that for those who live on hope rather than proletarian politics. But for several generations it has and continues to seem that way. The big majority of Jews who emigrated from Europe to the United States in the last half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth became workers in this country, many of them considering themselves socialists or communists of some variety. But the class composition of the Jewish population has changed dramatically over the past half century, with a majority of the children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren of these immigrants moving into better-off layers of “rent” collectors among the middle classes and professionals.¹

According to a study last year by the American Jewish Committee, the per capita income of Jews in the United States today is almost twice that of the rest of the population on average, while 61 percent of Jews had at least a four-year college degree versus 22 percent of the overall population.

In fact, one of the central aims of The Bell Curve² when it was published in 1994 was to justify this higher average income by arguing that even compared to others of relatively pale complexion in the United States, Jews—“specifically, Ashkenazi Jews of European origins”—are smarter than other people. According to the book, this explains “their disproportionate level of success, usually by orders of magnitude,” in various arenas of achievement. Thus, no guilt: you were just born smarter than “shvartzes” and their slightly lighter-skinned brethren. Adam Smith’s invisible hand takes care of the rest. Be generous and tolerant. Enjoy being an American.

So long as the imperialist system prevails, however, neither the United States nor anywhere else will be a “promised land” for the Jews for a long period in history. For Jews in this country, the consequences of the long hot winter world capitalism has entered will bring more—and much worse—than the mounting economic instability and insecurity that will hit widening layers of the middle classes. It will bring in its wake a new rise of fascist organizations that will target not just the labor movement, Blacks, women, and others among the oppressed and exploited, but will also lace their radical anticapitalist demagogy and conspiracy mania with Jew-hating filth and carry out physical assaults on Jews.

The U.S. bourgeoisie and their petty-bourgeois spokespersons—including many who are Jewish—promote comfortable assurances that “it can’t happen here.” But such delusions offer no greater protection to Jews in the imperialist United States (or Europe) than it did to those convinced in the 1920s and 1930s that they had fully “assimilated” into capitalist society in enlightened Germany.  
 
Not a ‘peace process’
What the Israeli rulers are seeking to impose in order to consolidate Israel within borders of their own choosing is not a “peace process,” as it’s dubbed by liberals in the big-business media. It’s the consolidation of an Israel still based on the forcible expulsion of the Palestinian majority, together with the “right of return” of those of Jewish parentage—and only those of such parentage. Its newly imposed borders will roughly correspond to the 400-mile-long wall the Israeli rulers are building inside the occupied West Bank, which lops off up to 10 percent of that occupied territory for Israel. What’s more, Tel Aviv intends to hold onto East Jerusalem and selected large suburban Jewish settlements in the West Bank, as well as strategic military locations along the Jordanian border.

There can and will be no long-term peace with the dispossessed Palestinian people on that basis. Or on any other basis that forcibly seeks to guarantee a permanent, large Jewish majority in Palestine. The Israeli rulers aren’t pulling back from their “right” to demolish the family homes of Palestinians accused of bombings or other attacks, let alone their “obligation” to “execute” members and leaders of Palestinian organizations they hold responsible for “terrorism.”
 
Factionalism in bourgeois politics
Nor will this be a smooth process within the Israeli ruling class itself. Factionalism is on the rise in bourgeois politics there, too. We should take seriously the end of the exclusive domination of the Labor Party by Ashkenazi Jews from Europe, as signaled last year by the defeat in the race for party leader of longtime Labor patriarch Shimon Peres by Amir Peretz, a Moroccan-born Sephardic Jew. Peretz is also the top official of the Histadrut, the union federation and social organization closely tied into the Israeli state from its origins. This shift in the Labor Party, which governed uninterruptedly for almost three decades following Israel’s establishment in 1948, became inevitable once that government monopoly had been broken in 1977 by the Likud Party, which has a strong electoral base among the more highly proletarian Sephardic Jews.

Now the Likud has split, with Sharon, Olmert, and other of its leaders forming a new party, Kadima, and picking up Peres and others on the rebound from Labor, at least for the time being. Olmert is also the first Israeli prime minister who is neither a military figure from one or more of Israel’s wars from 1948 to today nor a veteran leader of the Zionist organizations that established the Israeli state. Those were the roots of David Ben-Gurion, Golda Meir, Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Rabin, and others. The military is how Ariel Sharon made his mark in Israel for four decades before settling in as a Likud Party leader in the mid-1980s.

Olmert’s Likud opponent in the upcoming elections, former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, served in an elite unit that carried out commando operations at the Beirut airport in 1968 and in 1972 at Israel’s Ben Gurion airport, during which he was wounded. (Benjamin Netanyahu’s brother, Yonatan, moreover, is an Israeli hero and martyr, having been killed in action while leading from the front the near-legendary 1976 commando raid on Uganda’s Entebbe airport. Some 200 Israeli special forces stormed the airport building, rescuing 100 Air France passengers, mostly Israelis, being held hostage. All seven hijackers, twenty Ugandan soldiers, and three hostages were killed during the operation. Netanyahu was the only Israeli commando killed.)

But that period in Israeli politics has come to an end. Olmert’s Kadima Party will get the biggest vote in the election, but whatever party or coalition of parties comes out on top, this overall direction in bourgeois politics in Israel is irreversible.³

As all this unfolds, the stakes continue to mount for the Palestinian people in forging a leadership adequate to the tasks before them, which remains the fight for a democratic, secular Palestine.⁴ The bourgeoisification and political retreat of the leadership of the Palestine Liberation Organization, described in “The Opening Guns of World War III” some fifteen years ago⁵, has proceeded apace. The PLO long ago exhausted its capacity to lead forward the Palestinian toilers in fighting for national liberation.

The bourgeois-nationalist opposition, Hamas, with its origins in the Muslim Brotherhood, neither has any alternative program or strategy to advance the struggle, nor offers more space to the proletariat to organize and act in the interests of the toiling majority of the Palestinian people.  
 
A road forward
A road forward out of this political morass can only—and will—come out of the response of new generations of working people and youth as the struggle continues on many fronts: fights for land; for water rights; for freedom of movement, freedom to travel; for jobs, decent wages, and union protection; for the release of political prisoners; for women’s equality; against the brutal operations of Tel Aviv’s cops, troops, and commandos; against war threats and mounting prospects for devastating military blows against sections of Israel itself; and many others. Neither we nor anyone else has a script or a timetable of how the forging of such a leadership, a communist leadership, will unfold in Palestine, or anywhere else in the world.

As for Israel itself, a revolutionary leadership that is proletarian internationalist to its core must be built there too—a secular, multinational leadership, with a substantial Jewish component in its makeup. This is a difficult task under the social, political, and military conditions prevailing in Israel. It won’t happen rapidly. And the Palestinian people will not wait, and cannot be asked to wait, for class divisions and conflicts to deepen enough inside Israel for such a process to take place.

Once again, no timetables. A communist leadership of Jewish and Arab workers and farmers—dedicated to the fight for a democratic secular Palestine, and for socialist revolution—can and will be built, however. It will be built as growing numbers of toilers come to understand that if this task is not achieved in time, there will be little left of that part of the world.

January 2006

2. Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (New York: Free Press, 1994), p. 275. This book seeks to provide a “statistical” and “scientific” rationalization for the high income of middle-class and professional layers. In a computerized society in which a “cognitive elite” is in great demand, the authors argue, such wealth and privilege are rewards for being smarter. According to the authors, as you move from lower to higher IQs along the “bell curve,” those in the upper middle classes (the “cognitive elite”)—due to “innate” intelligence—will be bunched at the right or “smarter” end.

3. Former Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon resigned from Likud in November 2005, forcing a split in the party that ruled at that time. Fourteen Likud members of parliament and two from the main opposition Labor Party joined him in launching a new political formation called Kadima, or “Forward.” Sharon suffered a massive stroke in January 2006 and has remained in a coma ever since. Kadima nonetheless won a plurality in the Israeli elections in March and formed a coalition government that includes the Labor Party.

4. For an explanation of the political centrality and revolutionary character of the fight for a democratic, secular Palestine, see the 1971 Socialist Workers Party resolution, “Israel and the Arab Revolution,” in the Education for Socialists bulletin of the same name (Pathfinder Press, 1973).

5. For more on the political evolution of the PLO see “Washington’s Assault on Iraq: The Opening Guns of World War III,” by Jack Barnes, in New International no. 7 (1991), pp. 87-91.
 
 
Related articles:
Political crisis unfolds in Israel in aftermath of war on Lebanon  
 
 
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