Well before Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, pogrom, the Militant explained working people must oppose Jew-hatred and why. Hamas, backed by the reactionary regime in Tehran, slaughtered 1,200 people in Israel that day because they were Jewish or worked side by side with Jews, shattering illusions that Jew-hating pogroms were a thing of the past.
As today’s crisis of capitalism unfolds — amid sharpening rivalries and deepening class struggle, similar to what happened leading up to the last two world wars — Jews are used as scapegoats by reactionary forces, from the “right” and “left” of bourgeois politics, in an attempt to derail struggles by working people.
“We often see the capitalists fomenting hatred against the Jews in order to blind the workers, to turn away their attention from the enemy of working people, capital,” V.I. Lenin said in 1919 on a phonograph recording played throughout Russia for workers and peasants. Lenin was the central leader of the Bolshevik Party, which led the fight to overthrow the reactionary czarist regime in Russia and brought the working class to power.
Israel came to be in 1948 because the imperialist powers turned away Jews fleeing the Holocaust leading up to, during and after World War II. And because after Lenin’s death the Stalinized Communist Parties from Russia to Spain, Germany and beyond betrayed opportunities for working people to take political power into their own hands, paving the way for Adolf Hitler and his capitalist-financed Nazi party and its “Final Solution.” Where were the Jews to go?
In today’s world, if Tehran had nuclear weapons, there is no doubt it would use them to wipe Israel off the face of the earth and with it half of the Jews in the world, along with the Arabs, Muslim and Christian, who live there.
Class divisions in Israel
Israel is the only place in the world where Jews are defended arms in hand. Israel’s defense as a continuing refuge from pogroms requires dismantling Hamas and the group’s command structures. Hamas will not voluntarily disarm, nor is there any force, other than Israel today, that is willing to fight to defeat it.
At the same time, Israel is a class-divided country in a capitalist state that undermines the fight against Jew-hatred.
Arab citizens of Israel — some 20% of the population — face discrimination in housing, jobs and access to public services.
As a result of Israeli control, millions of Palestinians in the West Bank face restrictions on working their farmland, lack of water, and abuse by some Israeli settlers and army units.
At a time when opposition to the death penalty is growing among working people in Iran — and the regime in Tehran has stepped up executions in a bid to silence opposition — the Israeli parliament approved a law mandating the death penalty for Palestinians from the West Bank who commit murder with the aim of “negating the existence of the State of Israel.”
These actions by Israel’s capitalist government are attacks on the interests of the entire working class.
Another way Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu weakens Israel is by sowing illusions in the need for collaboration with U.S. imperialism. “America is fighting with Israel for a common goal: to protect our future, to protect civilization against these barbarians,” he said March 19.
“The US ruling families, their political parties, and their government have never lifted a finger to defend Jews in Israel, Europe, North America, Australia, or anywhere else,” noted a March 1 statement from the Socialist Worker Party National Committee. “Nor have the US rulers ever acted to advance the interests and aspirations of the some two million Palestinians in Gaza, and millions more Palestinians and Arabs in Israel itself and across the region.”
“Washington has been and remains the biggest obstacle to Israel obtaining a decisive defeat of Hamas,” the statement points out. And of Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Haaretz, a daily newspaper in Israel that makes excuses for Hamas’ Jew-hatred, admitted in an article May 1 that support for the existence of Israel has been increasing among Palestinians.
“Israel’s legitimacy in the eyes of” Arab Israelis rose in the wake of Oct. 7, professor Sammy Smooha, who has studied Jewish-Arab relations in Israel for 50 years, told the paper. “They felt more of a connection with Israel.” That’s the opposite of what he expected.
Somaya Bashir, a Muslim woman and well-known bourgeois politician, told Haaretz about discussions she’s had with other Arab citizens of Israel on the road forward.
Following an anti-Jewish terrorist attack in Hadera in 2022, “we talked about what it means for us to live in Israel, that we have no other land, and the Jews don’t either, and that we need to get along together.”
In fact, defending the rights of Arab citizens of Israel — who are essential to the defense of Israel as a refuge for Jews — also strengthens the fight against Jew-hatred.
Twenty years ago there were 500 young Arabs or Bedouin who volunteered for Israel’s National Service, a companion force to its army. “There are currently 4,138 Arab Israelis doing National Service,” Haaretz reports. That’s up from 3,300 before Oct. 7.
There is no party in the West Bank or Israel today that is organizing Jews, Arabs, immigrants and others to advance a course to bring the working class to power. Defending Israel today, as a refuge from Jew-hatred, is central to building that kind of party in Israel, the Middle East and throughout the world.