Israel’s leaders have made it unmistakably clear they will take the steps needed to prevent Hamas’ key backer — Tehran — from ever getting its hands on nuclear weapons.
But Israel’s fight is not over and the stakes involved are enormous for working people in the Middle East and worldwide. Another Holocaust is possible as long as capitalism exists.
Dismantling Hamas will increase the political space working people of the Middle East — of all religions and nationalities, Arabs, Jews, Persians, Kurds and more — can use to fight for their common class interests. That’s a necessary foundation for workers uniting, acquiring more class-struggle experience, developing class consciousness and drawing together fighters to build revolutionary working-class parties.
As this battle is unfolding, the capitalist world “order” is in deepening crisis, with sharp trade conflicts, financial crises, deepening class polarization and a steady march toward more shooting wars between rival ruling classes, many armed with nuclear weapons.
The only force capable of stopping this future is the working class. There is an uptick in labor battles today and growing numbers of workers see the need for our class to take political power into our own hands.
The “Jewish question” is not just posed in Israel. In times of deepening crisis, the capitalist rulers turn to Jew-hatred and fascist thugs to divide the working class, unleash new pogroms and smash the unions. This is the lesson of history in the imperialist epoch.
This reality underscores the iron necessity of working people breaking from the capitalist parties, and building parties of our own — working-class parties that are strong enough and firm enough to lead millions to overturn capitalist rule. Establishing workers power and ending capitalist exploitation opens the road to eradicating national oppression, including Jew-hatred, for all time.
The U.S. government is on a course counter to Israel’s today. Washington seeks to get the regime in Tehran to cut a deal to limit its nuclear weapons program to help stabilize the region and to draw it into trade and collaboration, and toward a break with the U.S. rulers’ main rival, Beijing.
Washington seeks to constrain Israel, pressing its government to hold off any targeted military strike to take out the Iranian rulers’ nuclear facilities.
The fight to prevent another Holocaust is central to world politics. It’s inseparable from the struggle against national oppression, a struggle the working class must champion as we build parties of our own, with a tested leadership to chart a course forward.
There are examples we can look to — the Bolshevik Party led by V.I. Lenin that guided Russia’s workers and peasants to power in 1917, and the 1959 overthrow of the Fulgencio Batista dictatorship in Cuba led by Fidel Castro that led to the first socialist revolution in the Americas.
In the U.S. the Socialist Workers Party has been built in continuity with those revolutions. It is an internationalist party, in solidarity with workers’ struggles worldwide. The SWP calls for Washington to get its vast military forces — aimed ultimately against rebellions by working people — out of the Middle East.
The SWP points, above all, to the capacities of workers to take political power here in the U.S. and join the fight to extend the socialist revolution worldwide.