Statement released April 15 by Rachele Fruit, Socialist Workers Party candidate for president of the United States.
SWP presidential candidate Rachele Fruit
is working-class alternative
to capitalism’s march to depression and war
The Socialist Workers Party calls on working people in the United States and the world over to condemn pressure by the U.S. government of Joseph Biden to dictate to Israel what it must or must not do to defend itself as a refuge for the Jews.
The Iranian government’s April 13-14 missile and drone onslaught was the first direct attack on Israeli territory by Tehran’s capitalist rulers, who until then had relied on armed and financed proxies such as Hamas, Hezbollah in Lebanon, militias in Iraq and Syria, the Houthis in Yemen, and others. The massive aerial assault was a dangerous escalation of Tehran’s unrelenting drive over decades to destroy the state of Israel and the Jews — to bring about “the disappearance of this entity from the face of the earth,” as Supreme Leader Ali Husseini Khamenei put it last January.
That assault was another step in the mounting Jew-hatred and violence that deals a dangerous blow to the interests of the working class, labor movement, and the oppressed everywhere.
On Oct. 7 Hamas carried out a pogrom in Israel slaughtering 1,200 Jews, wounding 5,000, and seizing over 240 hostages, most of them still in captivity or subsequently killed. The action was planned, financed and directed by the Iranian government.
Tehran, which welcomed the massacre from the outset but denied any involvement, now acknowledges that Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Brig. Gen. Mohammad Reza Zahedi, the main target of Israel’s strike on an Iranian annex in Damascus April 1, played “a strategic role” in “planning and executing” the Oct. 7 pogrom.
Ever since then, as cover for its pressure on Israel to bow to orders from the U.S. rulers, Washington has publicly insisted that Tehran had no foreknowledge of the massacre — not just a lie, but one the U.S. rulers know full well to be a lie.
Moreover, the Iranian rulers’ accelerated drive to develop nuclear weapons raises the danger of their use against Israel, a deadly peril to all those in the region.
The capitalist rulers in the United States are out to defend their own imperialist interests throughout the Middle East. They don’t act out of concern for Israel, for Jews living there or anywhere else, for the Palestinian people, or anyone except the propertied families whose class interests and privilege Washington serves and protects.
Since Hamas launched its war Oct. 7, Israel has been acting to defeat Hamas, to prevent it from carrying out its stated goal. That genocidal goal is one that Hamas shares with the reactionary rulers in Iran: to drive out the Jews, exterminate them and destroy the state of Israel.
Tightening sanctions against Iran, as proposed by Washington and other imperialist powers, hits working people there the hardest. Meanwhile, those very same workers, exploited farmers, and others — of Persian, Kurdish, Arab, Azerbaijani, Baluchi, and other national origins — have repeatedly found ways to express their opposition to Tehran’s repressive policies and expansionist anti-Israel course.
Almost half the world’s Jews today live in Israel. Washington and other imperialist governments shut their doors to Jews before, during, and after the Nazi Holocaust and after World War II, as 40% of the Jewish population on earth was slaughtered. There was nowhere for the survivors to go but to what became Israel.
The fight against Jew-hatred and pogroms is decisive for the working class the world over. As Washington — humanity’s final empire — declines; as class struggles deepen; and as the U.S. and other ruling families fear working-class challenges to capitalist rule itself, growing layers of this class will turn to fascist forces to divide, attack, and seek to crush workers, the oppressed, and the unions. The rulers will raise the banner of Jew-hatred to scapegoat Jews as the enemy, not the capitalist system whose dog-eat-dog quest for profits is the inevitable root of social breakdowns, depression and wars.
The labor movement must organize and unite the working class, strengthen our capacity to fight, and chart a course in action to take state power into our own hands. Along that road, the banner of the working class must call for an uncompromising fight against Jew-hatred.
My party’s continuity goes back to V.I. Lenin and the Bolshevik Party, which led the working-class and other exploited toilers in making the October 1917 socialist revolution in Russia. The fight against national oppression of every kind, including Jew-hatred and pogroms, was key to that victory and to the revolutionary government and world movement it gave birth to.
In face of privileged, counterrevolutionary social layers in the Soviet Union headed by Joseph Stalin, the struggle to continue Lenin’s proletarian internationalist course, led by Leon Trotsky, also championed the battle to end capitalist exploitation and all national oppression, including persecution of the Jews.
Contrary to the capitalist tickets of Democrat Joseph Biden, Republican Donald Trump, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and others, my campaign, the Socialist Workers Party campaign, offers the only working-class alternative to combat imperialism’s march toward economic and social catastrophe, fascism, and a third world war.
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