Everything the bosses and their governments do is aimed at protecting their investments, markets and profits and their cutthroat national interests against rival capitalist regimes. Workers have an opposite class standpoint — we are one international class of toilers with common interests in the fight against imperialist exploitation, oppression and war.
Workers in the U.S., Israel, Gaza and worldwide have a vital stake in the defeat of Hamas. So do our unions. Hamas’ massacre of Jews Oct. 7 was a step toward its reactionary goal — slaughtering all Jews or forcing them to flee the Middle East.
Jew-hatred plays a special universal and unceasing role under capitalism. Despite the pious claims of the “democratic” imperialist powers who say the Nazi Holocaust’s slaughter of 6 million Jews could never happen again, fascist forces will continue to emerge as long as crisis-ridden capitalism exists.
The normal workings of the profit system breeds sharper and sharper crises and deepening battles between bosses and the working class. Reactionary forces scapegoat Jews for the calamities created by capitalism, seeking support from growing middle-class layers threatened with ruin. When sections of the capitalist class see the depth of their crisis leading workers and our unions to unite and organize to topple their rule, they turn to fascist thugs, using the banner of Jew-hatred to try and crush the unions and revolutionary working-class parties like the Socialist Workers Party.
Reactionary forces everywhere see their main threat as the working class and its struggles to replace capitalist exploitation with workers power. It’s not by chance that Hamas’ founding charter blames Jews for the 1917 Bolshevik-led Russian Revolution.
Workers worldwide today confront deepening attacks on our jobs, wages, working conditions and political rights. As the title of the popular Pathfinder book says — the low point of labor resistance is behind us. More of us are using the unions to resist.
Today Washington is pressing the Israeli government to agree to a longer and longer cease-fire, to back off from scoring a decisive defeat of Hamas. Calls for an immediate and permanent cease-fire by the United Auto Workers and a few other unions point in the same direction. But in fact, there was a cease-fire in place on Oct. 6, one that was broken by Hamas’ murderous assault on Israel.
Those calling for a cease-fire focus attention on the worsening catastrophe facing Palestinians in Gaza. But it is Hamas that planned these conditions. The reactionary outfit takes international aid to buy weapons. They place their arsenals and missiles in hospitals and urban areas. Cynically using the plight of the Palestinians to win more funds from the U.N., EU and Washington, they ensure its forces can prepare for endless new rounds of attacks on Jews.
Calling for a cease-fire bolsters Hamas’ bigots, murderers and rapists that are morally repugnant to tens of millions of workers. Defeating Hamas and its threat to wipe out the Jewish people is the only way to open the door to common struggles by Israeli, Palestinian and Arab workers in the Middle East.
Jew-hatred is the deadly enemy of the working class. This is the lesson of the imperialist epoch and of Hitler’s Nazi dictatorship in Germany. The unions must lead working people to take it on, on the road to forging a working-class party to lead the revolutionary struggles that lie ahead.
Unions today need to back protests defending Israel’s right to exist and speak out against the rising assaults on Jews on campuses, at Jewish-owned restaurants, synagogues and elsewhere.
The future that stands before us is not fascist rule. We live in the epoch of working-class revolution. With effective leadership, our class can take power into our own hands and end the source of all oppression — capitalist exploitation — once and for all.