Israel’s fight to defend its existence as a refuge from Jew-hatred and pogroms is at the center of the intensifying rivalries gripping the world’s major capitalist powers today. For the working class, the defense of Israel’s existence is a key part of the broader struggle against imperialism’s march toward fascism, wider wars and the potential for a nuclear conflagration.
The U.S. rulers are determined to come out on top in the course of conflicts that have been building for years. They mark the deepening crisis the capitalist rulers face in every corner of the globe. Washington sees the biggest threat to their worldwide supremacy coming from the expansionist course of the Stalinist-molded regime in China, following the huge growth of capitalist industry there in recent decades and Beijing’s rise as a military power.
Washington is pressing governments everywhere to tie their future to continuing U.S. supremacy, to sever ties with Beijing. The Middle East, the source of a quarter of the world’s oil and natural gas, is a key arena for this conflict, and the U.S. rulers are determined to impose stability for their own interests there. Defense of Israel and the Jews takes a back seat in their priorities.
Those goals lay behind the Donald Trump administration’s efforts to cut a nuclear deal with Tehran. The reactionary rulers in Iran have made it clear they will never rest until they can achieve the destruction of Israel. At the same time, the most important curb on the Iranian rulers’ deadly ambitions is working people in Iran, who have taken to the streets in recent years to oppose the regime.
And these goals lay behind the deal Trump made with the Houthis in Yemen — backed and armed by the Iranian rulers — a deal that left the group free to continue its bombardment of Israel. And the recent business and military deals he made with the rulers in Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates.
Workers here have no interest in the U.S. rulers’ war preparations and push for profits at the expense of their rivals. We must unequivocally oppose the U.S. rulers’ predatory foreign policy, their sanctions on Iran — which fall heaviest on working people there — and their efforts to reinforce their massive military presence and intervention in the Middle East.
And we have an unqualified stake in backing Israel’s fight for a decisive defeat of Tehran’s proxies — the Houthis, Hezbollah and other Islamist militias — as well as Nazi-inspired Hamas, the main obstacle to common struggles by Jews, Palestinians and other working people.
The protests against Hamas across Gaza today reflect this.
And workers everywhere have a big stake in backing the targeted destruction of the Iranian regime’s nuclear capacities by Israeli forces. This is decisive to prevent Tehran from making good on its threats to Israel’s existence.
Defense of Israel’s existence as a refuge for the Jews must be a cornerstone of the program of struggle by the working class.
Israel exists because there was nowhere else for Jews to go. Prospects for ending capitalist rule, the source of both Jew-hatred and the bloody world wars of the imperialist epoch, were dealt bitter blows by the betrayal of revolutionary struggles in Germany, Spain and elsewhere in Europe by Stalinist parties in the 1930s and ’40s. At the same time, Washington, London and Ottawa refused to open their doors to Jews fleeing the Nazi’s Holocaust.
The working class must lead the fight against Jew-hatred and pogroms, and all forms of national oppression. That course is central to building revolutionary working-class parties strong enough to lead the toiling majority to take political power from the rulers and into our own hands. That will open the door to end the wars, national oppression and exploitation built into the capitalist system.
On that foundation workers can reorganize society and join together to meet the needs of the vast majority.
Join the Socialist Workers Party to help make that possible.