The wars that followed Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, pogrom against Jews in Israel and Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine the year before are front lines in the class struggle. Workers have big stakes in backing Israel’s war to prevent Tehran-backed Hamas from carrying out another Holocaust and in defending Ukraine’s sovereignty, while demanding the U.S. rulers get their military forces out of Europe and the Middle East.
For the world’s capitalist rulers, these wars are proving grounds for new weapons and battle tactics.
Driven by fierce rivalry over markets, resources and spheres of influence, Washington and other capitalist powers grab new technology to make the most lethal weapons ever known. They do so as violent conflicts built into the imperialist epoch grow. The rulers are marching humanity toward fascism, a third world war and the threat of nuclear annihilation.
President Donald Trump is using tariffs to bring industrial production back to the U.S. This is a key part of the rulers’ preparation to churn out weapons of war, as they did in World War II, not an attempt to turn the clock back to a mythical “golden age,” as liberals argue.
Under both Democratic and Republican administrations, trade conflicts and war preparations are carried out in the name of defending “our” national interests. There are none. Workers’ interests lie with fellow working people around the world and in linking together our common struggles. Along that road we can build working-class parties capable of leading tens of millions to take political power into our own hands.
The fight for workers power is the only way to prevent another Holocaust. On that foundation workers can rebuild society based on human solidarity and fight to end national oppression for all time. Israel’s existence became a necessity after Stalinist betrayals destroyed promising revolutionary opportunities in the 1930s, the horror of the Holocaust and moves by Washington and other “democratic” imperialist powers to slam their doors shut to Jews. But Israel is not a solution to ending Jew-hatred and pogroms, which arise as capitalist crises and conflicts grow.
The rulers scapegoat Jews to divert the anger of ruined middle-class layers and some demoralized workers away from the source of the problem — capitalist rule. In times of deep crisis, they turn to fascist thugs.
Jew-hatred and pogroms are not eternal. “Now more than ever,” Leon Trotsky wrote before World War II, “the fate of the Jewish people — not only their political but also their physical fate — is indissolubly linked with the emancipating struggle of the international proletariat.”
To be part of this historic battle, join the Socialist Workers Party and help assemble the forces that can lead working people to make a socialist revolution in the U.S., part of the fight for a socialist world.