NEW YORK — “One year after the Oct. 7 pogrom in Israel, there is no change in the decadeslong reactionary aims of the regime in Tehran and the organizations it leads, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and others,” said Dave Prince, a member of the Socialist Workers Party National Committee. He was speaking on today’s deepening showdown in the Middle East at a Militant Labor Forum here Oct 13.
The pogrom announced another Holocaust, Prince said. It hoisted the blood-soaked banner that Palestine “will be free” — free of Jews. This includes the Iranian capitalist regime’s threat to use nuclear weapons to achieve that goal, with horrendous consequences for millions of Jews, Palestinians and Arabs in that region, as well as for the toilers worldwide.
Similar forums have been held in cities across the U.S., and in Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom.
The pogrom was carried out by “trained death squads,” Prince reminded the 40 forum participants. “They can’t be defined in any other way. Hamas has historical roots in Hitler’s Nazi party” and shares its goal of the “Final Solution.”
“During the pogrom, the death squads slaughtered 1,200 men, women and children, regardless of age, nationality or sex. They employed special brutality toward women, inflicting rape and sexual abuse,” Prince said. “And abuse of men.”
“Why? Because they were Jews.”
Hamas death squads slaughtered dozens of Arab citizens of Israel, immigrant workers and others who weren’t Jewish, as well. “They were deliberately targeted because they associate with Jews.”
“Hamas took 250 hostages,” he said. “More than 100 have been released, others killed. All the hostages should be freed. There is no need for a cease-fire for Hamas to release the hostages.”
“Following the Oct. 7 pogrom,” Prince said, “the Socialist Workers Party placed itself unhesitatingly in defense of Israel’s right to defend the safety of a refuge for Jews.
“The SWP is not neutral,” he said. “We’ve campaigned widely for the defeat of the capacity of Hamas and Hezbollah, led by Tehran, to carry out expanding pogroms. The party looks at this, like every question, in class terms: What is in the interests of the working class.”
Prince described the deep opposition and abhorrence to the pogrom in the working class in the U.S. That’s the response of the big majority of unionists in labor and broader struggles, in working-class communities and among exploited producers worldwide.
Millions of toilers are entering into politics today, Prince pointed out. They want to know: What is the origin of pogroms and Jew-hatred? Is the world heading toward World War III?
The centrality of fighting Jew-hatred is not a Middle East question, but an international question, a class question. As the irresolvable crises of their system of exploitation deepen, sections of the ruling class will seek to divert the anger of insecure or ruined middle-class layers, as well as small numbers of discouraged workers, away from capitalism as the source of their problems.
“Jew-hatred and pogroms are the banner used by reactionary forces around the world against all the toilers,” Prince said. “This will be more and more sharply posed as the class struggle deepens. The greatest illusion is that Washington’s imperialist ‘democracy’ was, is, or can be a safeguard against fascist reaction.”
U.S. imperialist interests
“Washington has never acted in the Middle East on the basis of fighting Jew-hatred,” Prince said. “It acts on only one thing: the U.S. ruling capitalist families’ economic, military and political interests in the Middle East. It acts on their determination to remain the dominant imperialist power.”
In the discussion period SWP leader Steve Clark pointed out that when five reactionary Arab regimes launched a war against the newly established State of Israel in 1948, Washington imposed an ironclad arms embargo on Israel. “If it hadn’t been for the short period when the Stalinist regime in Moscow found it useful to do so, allowing the government in Czechoslovakia to sell arms to Israel,” the Jewish state would have had no arms to defend itself.
Today there are tactical divisions within the U.S. ruling class. But the Joseph Biden administration has pressed Israel to end the war on Hamas, accept a cease-fire in Gaza and back off from dealing blows to Hezbollah. In doing so, Biden is following in the footsteps of the Barack Obama administration, which sought to appease Tehran in order to advance U.S. interests.
If the Israeli government had followed the course pushed by Washington, it would have led to a disaster. Hamas — backed by Tehran — has said over and over that it will never rest until Israel and all the Jews there are eliminated.
There are two big centers of the Jewish population in the world today, Prince pointed out. There are some 7 million Jews in Israel, 7 million in the U.S. and another 2 million worldwide. At its longest point, Israel stretches for 260 miles, Prince noted, “and at its widest about 70 miles, tapering down to 10.”
These facts show that Israel can lose a prolonged war of attrition.
A large percentage of Israel’s population lives in its three largest cities: Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and Haifa. A nuclear strike from Tehran would be disastrous, annihilating Palestinians, Arabs and Jews alike. Some 20% of Israel’s population are Arabs.
Israel is capitalist, class divided
In response to a question about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Prince replied that he is a capitalist politician who “wants and needs U.S. imperialism’s support. What distinguishes him, however, is that he understands that Israel must act — and does act — to defend itself, despite the U.S. rulers’ ‘advice,’ because he knows there can be a world without Israel and Jews.” That lesson of the Holocaust cannot be forgotten.
Netanyahu knows the U.S. rulers, during World War II and ever since, have acted irrespective of the consequences for Jews and Israel. Another Holocaust would be a devastating setback not just for Jews, but for working people in the Middle East and around the world.
“I have a message for you,” Netanyahu said in an appeal for support at the U.N. General Assembly Sept. 27. “Israel will win this battle. We’ll win this battle because we don’t have a choice.”
The Socialist Workers Party stands with the fight to defend the safety of a refuge for Jews, Prince said.
But that fight, he added, is weakened by the fact that Israel is a capitalist state. Jew-hatred is intrinsic to the imperialist epoch and it will continue to raise its head unless the working class takes political power — in Israel and Palestine, across the Middle East, in the U. S. and the world over.
The same thing is needed in Israel that is needed in the U.S. and around the world. Revolutionary parties rooted in the working class must be built that can unite workers, whatever their religious beliefs or national origin, to take political power out of the hands of the capitalist exploiters. On that road, solidarity will be built that can resolve seemingly intractable conflicts among peoples of differing national and racial origins.
In response to a question on the national rights of Palestinians, Prince pointed out that “Hamas has nothing to do with the aspirations of the Palestinian people.
“Hamas has placed its military operations in the middle of population centers, schools and hospitals. Yahya Sinwar was known for his brutality toward Palestinians.
“The fate of the Palestinians is tied to the fate of the Jews,” Prince said. “It’s going to be in the struggle against capital and imperialism, in the struggle for which class rules, that working people will find the road forward, including resolving national questions.”
Where were the Jews to go?
“A capitalist Israel became inevitable coming out of the Second World War and Holocaust,” Prince said. “That history is central to understanding what’s unfolding today.
“Israel’s 1948 independence war,” he said, “did not come out of Zionism, a bourgeois movement dating back 125 years organized for a Jewish religious-national homeland. Israel emerged from the outcome of the second imperialist slaughter and betrayals by Stalinism of revolutionary developments from the late 1920s through the war and postwar years — including in France, Germany, Spain, Greece, and elsewhere, where workers had lost opportunities to take power.
“The Stalinists betrayed promising developments by Jews and Arabs in the region in building communist parties. This included supporting reactionary Arab regimes in bloody assaults on Jews. The Stalinists also betrayed promising developments in the U.S. labor movement.”
If workers had taken power in any of these cases, “it would have stopped or greatly changed the course of how the Second World War unfolded and its outcome,” Prince said.
At the same time, the U.S. imperialist rulers and their allies in Canada, the U.K., Australia and elsewhere shut their doors to Jews before, during and for several years after the Nazi Holocaust. Israel is the only country on earth that offers unconditional refuge to Jews, and defends them arms in hand.
“Where were the Jews to go?” Prince asked.
“The scourge of Jew-hatred and pogroms in the imperialist epoch,” Prince said, “can only be resolved as working people of all religions and ethnic origins join together in revolutionary struggles to make a socialist revolution.”
In response to a question about political resistance to the regime in Iran, Prince said, “Tehran acts on its expansionist aims to dominate the region politically and economically. This has come at great cost to the toilers in the region and inside Iran.” The Iranian regime is increasingly hated at home, and its military adventures abroad and attacks on toilers’ conditions spur resistance by oil workers, nurses, teachers, bus drivers, farmers and other working people.
Many forum participants stayed afterward for a reception and to continue the lively discussion.