My campaign as Socialist Workers Party candidate for president, alongside SWP candidates around the country, presents a working-class alternative to Biden, Trump, Kennedy and all the capitalist candidates. We’re becoming known as the socialists who act against Jew-hatred and in defense of Israel’s right to exist as a refuge for Jews fleeing persecution.
The worldwide explosion of Jew-hatred since Hamas’ Oct. 7 pogrom in Israel shows the need for a refuge today is not an abstract question. Israel was founded because the imperialist rulers in London and Washington slammed shut their borders to those fleeing the rise of the Nazis, as well as during and after World War II, and because of the slaughter of 6 million Jews in the Holocaust.
Israel must have a right to defend itself from destruction, the stated aim of the Iranian regime and all of its proxies — Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis.
Since our founding as a party in the U.S. that supported and seeks to emulate the Bolshevik-led Russian Revolution, the Socialist Workers Party has been in the forefront of the fight against Jew-hatred as an essential part of the fight to end all exploitation and oppression.
Throughout our history we have sought to advance a road to unite working people in the fight against our common oppressors. Our starting point is the class interests and solidarity of workers of whatever nationality or religious belief, whether they’re in the Middle East — Palestinians, Jews, Arabs, Kurds or otherwise — or working people here and elsewhere around the world.
In the U.S. and other imperialist countries, organizations of middle-class radicals claiming to be socialists explicitly disavow any course to advance class solidarity among working people. They celebrate the murders, rapes and torture of Jews and others by Hamas on Oct. 7. They accept the Jew-hating course of the Iranian government and Hamas as if it was an expression of the national aspirations of the Palestinian people.
Nothing could be further from the truth. The war between Israel and Hamas is not about the Palestinian national struggle. Israel is not at war with the Palestinian people. It is fighting to eliminate Hamas whose leaders say openly their reason for being is to kill Jews and destroy Israel.
There had been a cease-fire before Hamas shattered it in blood Oct. 7. That massacre shows once again that even in Israel the idea that a haven from Jew-hatred is possible is an illusion.
Hamas leaders say that they have no responsibility for the welfare of the Palestinian people. They’ve met protests by Palestinians in Gaza with repression. To speak out against Hamas has meant to take your life in your hands. There is no one claiming leadership among Palestinians who recognizes the right of Israel to exist or proposes a working-class road forward.
Hamas’ Oct. 7 pogrom confirms that there is no “two-state solution” possible today. Under its rule it’s impossible for a leadership worthy of the Palestinian people to develop. It will take the defeat of Hamas for a working-class leadership to be forged among Palestinians.
The capitalist government in Israel is committed to defeating Hamas because there is no other way to ensure the survival of the Jewish people. No other government on earth makes that commitment.
Washington and other “democratic” imperialist powers are backpedaling from defense of Israel and stepping up pressure on its government to stop the war, claiming they’re concerned about the humanitarian disaster in Gaza for their own class interests. That crisis — a product of Hamas’ rule — is all too real. But the imperialist powers care nothing for the Palestinians.
Where are the calls by capitalist governments and their mouthpieces at the United Nations on Hamas to release the hostages it seized? Or to demand its surrender? Or to use its riches to feed, clothe, house and provide medical care for the people of Gaza, instead of weapons to carry out their mission to eliminate the Jews?
It’s a deadly illusion that Jews can be assimilated enough in the U.S. — or anywhere else under capitalism — to avoid persecution. As is the notion that imperialist governments, or either the Democratic or Republican parties, can be relied on for protection. But to understand this, we have to see whose class interests have been served by the scapegoating of Jews in the imperialist epoch.
Road to solve the Jewish question
The workings of dog-eat-dog capitalism ruin growing layers of the middle class. Reactionary demagogues like Hitler blame Jews for the crisis produced by the profit system. When the capitalist class decides its rule is threatened by rising struggles of the working class, it will back fascist thugs to try to crush our unions, murder vanguard workers and annihilate the Jewish people. That’s the lesson of what happened in Germany in the 1930s.
Hamas’ origins lie in ultra-reactionary forces among ruling classes in Arab countries that allied with Hitler’s Nazi Party in the 1930s, based on a common desire to carry out the “Final Solution” — the slaughter of Jews worldwide. These forces included Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.
Incipient fascist currents emerged in the U.S. at the same time, like Mayor Frank Hague in Jersey City, New Jersey, who unleashed thugs to crush unions there. In Minneapolis the Teamsters, led by militants from my party, led unions to organize a workers defense guard and drove the fascists out of town.
The labor movement must stand up to Jew-hatred today, a central question for unions worldwide.
Workers and our unions must organize and act against all moves to slander, scapegoat and attack Jews. The working class is the only force capable of taking on and defeating reactionary Jew-hating forces in the U.S. and worldwide. It’s here in the U.S. — home to the rulers of the world’s last empire — that the battle against Jew-hatred will be decisive.
As the world capitalist economic crisis brings devastation and war to millions, the fight over which class will rule is the central question for working people everywhere. Combating Jew-hatred has a special place in this fight.