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Statement issued June 25 by the National Committee of the Socialist Workers Party.
Working people the world over have an enormous stake in an Israeli government victory in its life-or-death battle to prevent another Holocaust.That monstrous threat was announced by the October 7, 2023, pogrom jointly organized by the Tehran regime and Hamas. In recent months, that danger had been brought closer by the Iranian government’s accelerated course to develop nuclear weapons and a ballistic missile system to deliver them.
SOCIALIST WORKERS PARTY
NATIONAL COMMITTEE STATEMENT
If a single warhead were to strike one of Israel’s three main cities, the death toll would be devastating. Even a few such weapons of mass destruction could annihilate the vast majority of Israel’s 7 million Jews, as well as 2.5 million Arabs and others. With Israel as home to some half of all Jews on earth, a giant stride would be taken toward what Hitler and the Nazis called the “Final Solution” — the disappearance from history of Jews as a people.
As recently as May of this year, Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei declared that Israel “is a lethal, dangerous, cancerous tumor [that] should certainly be eradicated, and it will be.” And on June 16, four days after Israel’s decisive response to Tehran’s drive to arm itself with weapons of mass destruction, the regime’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps announced: “Operations will continue until the Zionist entity is eliminated.”
The coming together of these dangers since October 2023 is the reason the Israeli government on June 12 began directed attacks on nuclear and related military targets across Iran. These are defensive operations to put an end to the Tehran regime’s yearslong efforts to destroy the only state on earth that provides unconditional refuge from Jew-hating violence and pogroms.
The course of the US imperialist government, including Washington’s aerial and submarine missile strikes on Iran, has nothing to do with Israel’s life-or-death battle. To the contrary. The US rulers’ objective is to strengthen their own domination of the countries of the region, in order to exploit their natural wealth and the labor of millions of Arabs, Jews, Kurds, Druze, Yazidis, and other peoples. To impose a Pax Americana across the Middle East.
With more than 40,000 US troops already deployed in the region, along with two aircraft-carrier groups and many air and naval bases, Washington’s actions open the gates to spreading wars, with growing military and civilian deaths and casualties. Decisive Israeli military victories stopping both the Tehran regime and Hamas from achieving their genocidal goals, on the other hand, will deal a blow to the spread of wars across the Mideast. Such successes will also set back the imperialist powers, whose intensifying rivalries are marching humanity toward a third world war.
Those conquests remain to be settled.
The aim of the US ruling families and their government — whether the Obama, Biden and Trump administrations or their predecessors — has never been to defend Jews. In Israel or anywhere else. Nor do the US rulers care one iota about the two million Palestinians in Gaza, and millions more Palestinians and Arabs in Israel itself and across the region.
The US ruling class has its eyes firmly fixed on plunder. On pillage of the Middle East’s vast natural resources — oil and gas fields, above all — and exploitation of its low-wage labor.
Amid the capitalist world’s profit-driven rivalries and arms buildups today, the last thing Washington wants is to destabilize its economic, political, and strategic relations with bourgeois governments in the Middle East. It acts to maintain US imperialism’s interests — and its control — over what happens there. That’s why the withdrawal of US troops, airbases, warships, and other military installations from the Middle East is in the interests of working people across that region and around the world.
Nothing could be further from the truth than the claims by those on the bourgeois and petty bourgeois left that the State of Israel is a pawn of Washington. Israel’s capitalist government, as proven again in recent weeks, does not subordinate defense and survival of a refuge for Jews to any other state power anywhere on earth.
“Never again!” isn’t a catchphrase in Israel. It’s the determination of the Jewish people that the “Final Solution” shall not come to pass.
Tehran, Hamas’s genocidal course
The current military conflicts in the Middle East were set in motion by the October 7, 2023, pogrom in southern Israel, with Hamas and its Jew-hating allies acting as Tehran’s proxies. That pogrom was the open declaration of a renewed drive to exterminate Jews in the region and destroy the Israeli state. An immediate aim was to head off increasing prospects that Saudi Arabia and several other states in the region might join the Abraham Accords and recognize Israel’s right to exist.
On that infamous day, Hamas massacred some 1,200 Israeli men, women, children, and infants with indescribable brutality. Victims included residents of kibbutzes and other communities in the area, as well as those attending a large international music festival. The pogromists took more than 250 hostages back to Gaza, including some seriously injured and the bodies of others already dead. With the launching of this bloody battle by Hamas and Tehran along the Gaza border, Israel faced a war on seven fronts — from Hezbollah’s assaults launched from Lebanon in the north, to Iran in the east, Yemen to the south, and within Israel and the West Bank itself.
Hamas’s pogrom had been in the planning stages for years. It was the largest and deadliest attack on Jews since the Nazis’ mass executions and death camps, in which six million Jews were slaughtered during World War II.
Hamas also cold-bloodedly sacrificed many thousands of Palestinians in Gaza, whom they continue to use as human shields, as “martyrs.” This Nazi-inspired organization constructed hundreds of miles of military tunnels, weapons depots, and command posts beneath schools, hospitals, apartment complexes, and houses. They intentionally placed these military targets in civilian locations, so the resulting casualties could be exploited to win sympathy around the world. At the same time, having plotted such an all-out war for years, Hamas spent not a penny on shelters for the population.
Tehran’s genocidal aims have been brutally confirmed by its deliberate and indiscriminate targeting of population centers in Israel, including Palestinian neighborhoods. These civilians are the intended victims of Tehran’s drones, ballistic missiles, and cluster bombs.
Washington’s contempt for the working people of Gaza was made clear by President Trump’s “offer” to buy the territory, evacuate its population to somewhere else in the world, and turn Gaza into the “Riviera of the Middle East,” a playground for his billionaire class.
The large majority of the Israeli people support the government acting decisively to take advantage of Tehran’s temporarily weakened condition to deal a knockout blow to its nuclear weapons ambitions. The living history of the Holocaust during World War II, the reason Israel was founded, is ever present.
Support for Israel’s right to exist and its defensive military actions is also widespread among workers and toilers in countries throughout the world. Not only is there deep abhorrence of the October 7 pogrom, but tens of millions are outraged by the wanton violence of those who carry out or seek to justify acts of Jew-hatred under the false banner of anti-imperialism and “anti-Zionism.” In the United States alone in recent months, we’ve seen the brutal killings of two young Israeli Embassy staff members in Washington, D.C.; the firebombing in Boulder, Colorado, of Jews and others calling for release of the hostages; an arson attack on the home of the governor of Pennsylvania; and other outrages.
Jews and the imperialist epoch
The right of Israel to exist is not rooted in ancient history, when Jews, Arabs, and countless other tribes lived side by side in the same part of the world millennia ago.
The necessity for Israel to exist was decided in the imperialist epoch, opened in the final years of the nineteenth century. It was decided amid the disintegration of feudal relations across Eastern Europe, home to millions of Jews; the growing dominance of industrial capitalism; and the imperialist conflicts that led to World Wars I and II and their deadly consequences for hundreds of millions.
The right and necessity for Israel to exist were decided by the virulent targeting of Jews by Hitler’s Nazi regime, which seized power in Germany in 1933 and culminated in the mass slaughter of Jews across Europe in the Holocaust. In the epoch of imperialism, the fight against Jew-hatred is a class question for workers, wherever we live and toil. At the same time, it is a national question intertwined with the fight against all national oppression everywhere in the world.
As history has shown us, at times of deepening capitalist economic and social crisis, especially as the propertied classes begin fearing a challenge by workers and farmers to their own wealth and political rule, sections of the rulers promote Jew-hatred as one of the principal banners of reaction. They try to convince insecure layers of the middle classes, who fear being driven into the working class, as well as demoralized workers, that Jews are the cause of their social misery — not capitalism, not the exploiting classes, not the imperialist world order. Under such conditions groups of capitalists begin financing and fostering fascist and Nazi thugs to assault and try to destroy trade unions and working-class political parties, spewing Jew-hating demagogy as they do so.
The necessity for Israel as a refuge for the Jews was also the product of the Joseph Stalin-led Communist International. While falsely claiming the red flag of communist workers, the bloody Stalinist counterrevolution in the Soviet Union in the late 1920s and ’30s in fact physically liquidated the Bolshevik leadership and much of the working-class cadre of the October 1917 Russian Revolution and Communist International. Every aspect of the proletarian internationalist course of Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin, every aspect of Marxism, was negated.
The Stalinists, with their “Popular Front” policies, betrayed revolutionary working-class struggles in Germany, France, and Spain before World War II, as well as in Greece, Italy, and France following the war. Stalinist-led Communist Parties and their world movement worked to restabilize capitalist governments across Europe, in line with Moscow’s aspirations for “peaceful coexistence” with Washington and other exploiting powers.
Finally, Israel’s right and necessity to exist were decided by the often consciously ignored fact that so-called “democratic” imperialist governments in Washington, London, Paris, and elsewhere had full knowledge of what millions of Jews faced under the Nazis and allied fascist regimes before and during World War II. Moreover, these “democracies” themselves were directly culpable for what hundreds of thousands of Jewish survivors continued to face — many in so-called Displaced Persons camps across Germany, Italy, and Austria — after their “liberators” had defeated Nazi forces and imperialist rivals in those countries in 1945.
Yet every one of the imperialist victors, above all in the United States and United Kingdom, slammed their doors to Jewish immigration in the aftermath of the Holocaust.
Where were the Jews to go?
Counterrevolution in Iran
The capitalist, clerical-dominated regime of Iran — among the largest and most industrially advanced countries in the Middle East — consolidated its power some forty years ago.
Despite the rewriting of history by both backers of the current regime and imperialist propagandists, that reactionary capitalist government is not the heir of the revolutionary victory and initial conquests of the Iranian toilers that brought down the US-supported monarchy of Shah Reza Pahlavi in 1979.
Today’s regime is the product of a counterrevolution, aimed at crushing the gains of working people in that powerful mobilization. It was born of the rulers’ fear of the workers councils in factories and other workplaces across Iran; of farmers’ demands for land and the means to till it; of battles by oppressed peoples for language and other national rights; of the rise in struggles for women’s equality.
From the outset, the counterrevolutionary government and its thuggish militias, now the falsely named “Revolutionary Guards,” relied on stoking the flames of Jew-hatred. They hoped such toxic demagogy could help them divert the anger of working people and oppressed nationalities — Azerbaijani, Kurdish, Arab, Baluchi, and others — away from the increasingly repressive regime.
Especially since a renewed rise in 2017 of struggles by workers, farmers, women, and oppressed nationalities, however, the regime in Tehran has been met with growing hatred among broad layers of working people and the worse-off middle classes. More and more of them abhor the deaths and other consequences of the government’s expansionist military adventures across the region. That includes, earlier this year, the toll in lives and injuries from a massive port explosion caused by what working people have good reason to believe were clandestine shipments of chemicals to produce the regime’s missile fuel.
The majority of working people in Iran detest the government’s use of proxy forces to advance its reactionary goals across the region — Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza, the Houthis in Yemen, and until December 2024 the despised tyranny of Bashar al-Assad in Syria. The defeats struck by the Israeli government against these anti-working-class forces since October 7 are welcomed by the oppressed and exploited in Iran.
The pushing back of such reactionary forces across the region has increased confidence among working people in Iran of their own ability to organize and combat the counterrevolutionary government in Tehran. Workers, including those on the front lines of a recently concluded nationwide truckers strike, have rejected the regime’s calls to sacrifice and subordinate their demands in the name of support to Hamas and “Death to Israel.”
Iran’s working people, of many nationalities, remain the most important curb on the aims of the regime there. They are feared by both the Iranian rulers and imperialist powers.
Washington’s airstrikes on Iran are a gift to its counterrevolutionary rulers, helping them whip up “patriotic” support for their expansionist and Jew-hating course.
Build a revolutionary workers party
The crisis of imperialism is accelerating, and conflicts among rival capitalist powers are becoming ever more explosive. As during the buildup to the second imperialist slaughter of the twentieth century, Jew-hatred and violence are once again being openly embraced as a banner of reaction. It is capitalism and the ruling classes who are the enemy of working people everywhere, however, not “the Jews.”
The Socialist Workers Party is not a “peace party.” Unlike the capitalist parties — Democrat, Republican, or others — we don’t profess peace while championing war. We are the working-class answer to war, the antiwar party, against their wars. Mobilizing the working class and other exploited producers to prevent another Holocaust is essential to victory in that battle. As is the duty of every class-conscious worker in the United States to explain and fight for the unconditional demands:
Defend Israel’s right to exist as a refuge for Jews!
US troops, bases, and warships out of the Middle East!
The fight against US imperialism and its wars necessitates building a revolutionary working-class party, uncompromisingly independent of and opposed to the propertied rulers’ government and their political parties. The same is true for workers in countries everywhere on earth.
Our goal is to build a party capable of organizing and mobilizing workers and the oppressed in our millions to take state power out of the hands of the warmakers and exploiters, whose class domination perpetuates Jew-hatred, racism, the second-class status of women, and every form of national oppression and human subjugation.
That is the road to the revolutionary conquest of workers power in the United States. The road to socialist revolution, to joining hands with international working-class struggles that will create a new world built on cooperation, not dog-eat-dog capitalism. A socialist world.
Join the Socialist Workers Party on the front lines of that battle.