Tel Aviv protest against nation state bill July 14 2018
August 2—It’s official: Israel is an Apartheid state.
And US imperialism is preparing to reward it with the largest military aid package ever. Meanwhile the US has frozen $$hundreds of millions in food, medical and other humanitarian aid to Gaza, where 70% of its 1.9 million people rely on this aid to survive.
Thousands continue to protest at the Gaza border. Israeli soldiers have killed over 150, including children: most recently, a twelve-year-old boy.
Nationalist politicians like Hamas, peace talks, international sanctions and boycotts have gotten the Gazan masses nowhere. They – along with workers throughout Israel, the Middle East and the world – need communist revolution to tear down all walls and erase all borders.
Non-Jewish Israelis Now Legally in the Back of the Bus
A new Israeli “Basic Law” declares it to be “the nation-state of the Jewish people” even though 20% of Israeli citizens are not Jewish.
This new Basic Law – the equivalent of a constitutional amendment – tears up the Israeli Declaration of Independence. That 1948 document promised “the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants … freedom, justice and peace … complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex…freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture” and more.
Those promises were soon exposed as lies, just like the lies in the US Declaration of Independence. The new Basic Law, however, is an open Declaration of Fascism. Palestinians (Christian, Muslim and secular) in the West Bank and Gaza live under Israeli military rule in conditions that, more and more, resemble the Apartheid era in South Africa.
Some Druze and other legislators are petitioning the Israeli High Court to “stop this racist law.” (The Druze are an ethnically Arab minority group.) This will most likely go nowhere. Neither will appeals to the World Court. And let’s remember that the end of Apartheid has left the South African masses—especially black workers and youth – mired in the same bitter poverty
The potential for a brighter future can be seen instead in the young people who are stepping up to defy their fascist rulers and expose their racist lies.
Rebellious and Disaffected Youth Open to Communist Ideas
Palestinian children and youth are again fighting back. We must do everything we can to help them envision a communist future to fight for.
And it’s not just Palestinians.
Disaffection is widespread among Israeli army conscripts from poor homes. Some ten thousand of them are in jail, mostly for “desertion” or “going AWOL” in order to work to help their families survive.
Young American Jews recently abandoned a free propaganda tour sponsored by a Zionist group called “Birthright.” They joined Palestinians protesting home demolitions.
Dozens of groups mobilized thousands of people in Tel Aviv on July 14 to march against the Apartheid “Basic Law.”
Eighty thousand marched in Tel Aviv on July 22, part of a one-day general strike against religion-inspired attacks on LGBTQ people.
In the US, young people are pouring into the streets to protest racist immigration policies. “From Palestine to Mexico, All the Walls Have Got to Go!”
Their revolutionary potential will be realized when those young people, and older ones, embrace international communism as the only solution to the political-economic-social-cultural-environmental catastrophe that is global capitalism.
Communism: Even in Israel/Palestine
Utopian-communist ideals inspired kibbutzniks before Israel even existed. Kibbutzim were hundreds of Jewish agricultural collectives in which private property was banned. All goods were held in common and allotted to members according to need. Jobs were rotated and everyone participated in making decisions.
Two fatal errors prevented this experiment from advancing the international communist movement. First and foremost, kibbutzim were all-Jewish communities built on land formerly used by Bedouin nomadic herders or by Palestinian farmers. Second, they tried to function as islands in a sea of capitalism.
Capitalism swamped them. Manufacturing, and with it wage labor—unequal wages. A jump into the stock market. Land privatization policies that enriched Israel’s wealthiest capitalists. An influx of anti-communist Russian Jews.
Even worse, Zionist capitalists and their imperialist backers used these early Jewish farming villages on Arab land to stoke their racist propaganda mill. They used them to justify the “settlement” movement that has effectively annexed the West Bank.
Jewish-nationalist utopian communism shows that both nationalism and utopian communism are dead ends. The future of communism lies in a massive, integrated, International Communist Workers’ Party and world revolution. Help build this movement by reading, circulating, and translating Red Flag!
Front page of this issue
