The stakes for workers in the U.S., the Middle East and worldwide are enormous in backing Israel’s unfinished battle to defeat Hamas and Hezbollah once and for all, and to destroy the ability of the reactionary capitalist regime in Iran to acquire nuclear weapons and use them to obliterate Israel and open the door to another Holocaust.
The fight against Jew-hatred is inseparable from the working class’s struggle for its own emancipation. Jew-hatred and pogroms are an integral part of the permanent social convulsions and wars of the imperialist epoch. Whenever the capitalist class feels their rule is threatened, they turn to Nazi-like forces and their Jew-hating ideology to try to crush the workers movement. This is the lesson of the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Holocaust.
It poses sharply the need for workers and our unions to join today’s struggles against every act of scapegoating, persecuting, or assaulting Jews, whenever and wherever they arise.
Today that fight is centered in Israel, the only country in the world that unconditionally offers a refuge from Jew-hatred and pogroms, arms in hand. This deserves the wholehearted support of the working class and the unions.
Israel’s defense is weakened by the fact that it is a capitalist country and it relies on backing from U.S. imperialism. Like all “democratic” imperialist powers, the U.S. capitalist rulers consider the Jews expendable in their overriding drive to advance their economic, political and military interests.
A deepening showdown is inevitable in the Middle East. The current ceasefire between Hamas and Israel is inherently unstable as long as the conflict between Israel and Tehran’s “axis of resistance” remains unsettled. Hamas originated from forces that collaborated before and throughout World War II with Hitler’s Nazis, trying to extend the Holocaust in Europe across the Middle East and North Africa.
True to Hamas’ founding charter, which calls for slaughtering the Jews, it carried out the worst pogrom since the Holocaust on Oct. 7, 2023.
Last week, before releasing four Israeli hostages as part of the ceasefire, Hamas paraded them in front of a banner proudly celebrating its pogrom. It is intent on using the ceasefire to rebuild its military capacities and recruit more thugs pledged to “martyrdom” in the fight to annihilate the Jewish people.
Hamas and Tehran get political backing from the middle-class left worldwide, including a variety of Stalinist parties. Hamas relies on support from imperialist institutions, like the United Nations, and from capitalist governments in the region. They cover up its Nazi origins and real aims, and demonize and sanction Israel.
Only the working class can lead the fight to end Jew-hatred. Israel’s battle is at the forefront of this fight today.
In the course of making and defending the 1917 Russian Revolution, V.I. Lenin and the Bolshevik Party led working people to take on and defeat the czarist regime and reactionary forces that carried out pogroms against Jews. The Bolsheviks organized workers and peasants in their millions to take political power into their own hands, remove Russia from the carnage of World War I and end capitalist exploitation.
“Pogroms against the Jews are fatal to the interests of the workers and peasants revolution,” stated a resolution written by Lenin and passed by the new workers government. It “instructs all Soviet deputies to take uncompromising measures to tear the anti-Semitic movement out by its roots.” And that’s what the Bolsheviks led working people to do. This is the continuity the Socialist Workers Party is schooled in.
Building parties to lead the fight to overturn capitalist rule and establish workers power — in the U.S., the Middle East and worldwide — is the only road to end Jew-hatred for all time.