Zionism: Fascist Imperialist Creation, Part II here ♦ Weapons Producers Profit from Gaza Genocide here ♦
AGUADILLA (Puerto Rico), January 15. “Zionism is Fascism. Communism is the Solution!”
Zionism: A Fascist Imperialist Creation, part II
(Part I of this article is here)
All Workers Have More in Common with Each Other than with Any Capitalist or Imperialist
Capitalism Promoted Pogroms
The Russian imperial government organized pogroms (mass racist massacres) against working-class Jews in Russia, Poland, and Ukraine, starting in the nineteenth century. These began after Imperial Russia first acquired territories with large Jewish populations from the Ottoman Empire and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.
Russian rulers made these areas into the “Pale of Settlement” to control Jews and exclude them from the cities. They invented racist lies to win workers to intense antisemitism, scapegoating Jewish workers and peasants for capitalism’s failures.
They lied that Jews were “Christ killers,” “baby killers,” (claiming that Jews killed Christian babies to put their blood on their doors at Passover), and “cruel money lenders.”
Feudal nobles thought themselves above handling money. They used Jews as money lenders. Christian churches prohibited believers from lending money with interest. Jews loaned the nobles’ money with interest, keeping some as profit and giving the rest to the nobles. Then, the nobles confiscated all the money, calling all Jews “greedy usurers.”
Many Jewish workers fled to Europe and the US in response to pogroms. Large numbers joined the Bund, a Jewish socialist group. In the 1880s, thirty percent of Russia’s socialists were Jews. Many later left the Bund to join the Bolsheviks and helped organize the 1917 Russian Revolution.
That year, Winston Churchill, head of Britan’s navy, said that the creation of a Jewish state by the Jordan River under British protection “would be in harmony with the interests of the British Empire.”
In 1919, an estimated 100,000 Jews were killed in pogroms in Ukraine and Poland. They were accused of being Bolsheviks. Many were.
Founding Myth
The Zionists and their Christian backers pushed the myth that the Biblical story of Jews being enslaved in Egypt and expelled from Palestine was historic fact. It asserted that Jews had remained true to their beliefs despite wandering the world for 2000 years, and thus had the absolute need and right to return to their ‘homeland.’
There is no actual historical evidence of this. There is evidence, however, that Jews, Muslims, and Christians lived in Palestine side by side for over a thousand years. During the Ottoman Empire, some Jews converted to Islam, partly because Muslims paid lower taxes.
There is also evidence of the existence of Khazaria, a vast Khazar Kingdom (c. 650–965 CE). Not wanting to be subjects of either the Muslim or the Christian empires, the Khazars converted to Judaism. They also converted many others to Judaism in the Caucasus, along the Volga River, and in what is now Poland. In The Invention of the Jewish People, Tel Aviv University historian Shlomo Sand shows that Eastern European Jews originated from these areas, not from Palestine.
Zionists and imperialists used the founding myth and the “wandering Jew” stories to justify a Jewish state in Palestine. As nations and nationalism developed throughout Europe, they popularized the identity of “the Jewish people.”
Jewish Workers Fleeing Fascism Forced to Go to Palestine.
Many Jewish workers who fled fascist Europe in the 1920s and 1930s did not know anything about displacing Palestinians. They only hoped to start a new life, safe from pogroms and genocide. Neither the Ottoman-era Jewish residents, who lived for centuries alongside Muslims and Christians, nor most of the newcomers thought of starting a “Jewish state” to serve the interests of any imperialist.
To create a Jewish state, Palestine needed more Jews. British and US imperialists conspired to make Palestine the only place Jews fleeing the Nazis could go. The US slashed immigration of Jews to only 8,000 yearly in 1924. Britain also drastically restricted Jewish immigration.
Topping this, the US Zionist organizations opposed the entry of Jewish refugees from Nazi-occupied Europe to the United States!
In those decades, Jewish and Palestinian workers often united in struggles against British, Palestinian, and Jewish capitalist exploiters, especially in the port city of Haifa.
Jewish and Palestinian capitalists attacked these anti-racist and communist workers. Zionist thugs killed many Jewish workers for fighting alongside their Palestinian brothers and sisters.
Communism Will End Racism, Nationalism, and Imperialism
Capitalism is based on competition for maximum profits, made from exploiting workers. Competing capitalists capture rivals’ markets or destroy their industries through war. The rulers build nationalism to make us think we’re defending “our country” when we fight other workers to defend the rulers’ profits and empire.
Capitalism’s wage system needs racism and terror to divide and weaken our class, and pay some less, to keep us from uniting for revolution.
When the masses unite for communist revolution, we will eliminate production for profit, competition, and the wage system. We will create the material basis to abolish racism and nationalism. The communist masses, without nations or borders, will collectively produce only to meet humanity’s needs!
Weapons-Producing Factory for War: Get Out! January 2024
AGUADILLA (Puerto Rico), January 15 — With red flags flying defiantly, shouting “Free and Communist Palestine!” and other revolutionary slogans, members of Communist Workers and Students for Social Change demonstrated to repudiate Israel’s genocide in Gaza.They protested in front of facilities of Lockheed Martin, a leader in the armaments industry and the largest US military contractor. They denounced and condemned the fact that the US-backed genocide in Gaza is fueled by weapons produced by Lockheed Martin.
In solidarity with Palestinian masses, Communist Workers and Students for Social Change calls on the working class:
In recent months we have seen how many organizations, politicians and individuals have shown their repudiation of the genocide going on in Palestine. There have been calls for ceasefires, boycotts and for governments of different nations to speak out against the State of Israel. Despite all international efforts, the massacre continues. It is clear how the “democratic” apparatuses of the capitalist system have done nothing to stop the genocide against Palestinians. Their main interest is not to improve the life of the workers, but to maintain the system of international exploitation.
The State of Israel is a fascist state. They are the guardians of the oil interests of the West, in particular of the US. The Israeli government fulfills the mission of maintaining the status quo in the Middle East. It is enough to see the unconditional support by the United States towards the genocidal State of Israel to understand how fascism is capitalism in crisis.
Capitalism-imperialism: the Root of the Problem
Plans to extract oil from the Gaza coast; intentions to build real estate on rubble and corpses; expansionist projects of a “Greater Israel” that would expand across the Middle East. The events in Gaza are a very familiar story for Puerto Ricans who have lived through colonization mediated by military invasion. Just as the U.S. occupation opened the way for U.S. capital in Puerto Rico, the Israeli invasion seeks to expand its own capital on the backs of an exploited and massacred working class.
This is why the genocide in Gaza is driven by the capitalist and imperialist interests of Israel, the U.S. and the European Union. Currently, Israel serves as a US military base to control Middle East politics. To have access and control of more oil in the area, including Syria, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and Iraq. To have direct access and control of markets and trade routes through the Suez Canal, the Red Sea and the Mediterranean Sea. And to counter the influence of China and Russia in the region (with BRICS, among others).
Biden himself said that if there were no Israeli state the US would have to invent one, perfectly summarizing the US geopolitics of pushing fascist states like Israel throughout the world in order to defend its own economic interests, as well as in the alleged state of Taiwan, in Ukraine or in Chile. Why, then, should we put our hopes in political systems such as the United States?
What happens in the Middle East does not stay in the Middle East. Israel has trained death squads and drug traffickers destined for Latin America. It also trains many of the police who terrorize the U.S. working class. Likewise, Puerto Rico has served as a military base for the U.S., as well as an industrial producer of military uniforms and as a taxpayer aid to the arms industry such as Lockheed Martin, a major producer of weapons for Israel.
Who can stop this genocide if not the working class?
As communists we raise the banner of the international working class when we demonstrate against the State of Israel because it is the working class, not only in Palestine, but also in the Congo, Niger, Sudan, Haiti, Argentina, Somalia, Puerto Rico and around the world, who suffer the consequences of decaying capitalism. It is we, the working class, who are kept as wage slaves with miserable wages to fuel these genocides, manufacturing their armaments and uniforms, and fighting their wars.
The world capitalist/imperialist system is in crisis and decay, divided into economic blocs (China/Russia versus USA/EU). Every day the conflict between class interests sharpens more and more, opening the doors to fascism as a means of salvation for the capitalist system, thus dividing the working class.
We cannot fall into the trap of allowing ourselves to be divided on the basis of nationalist, religious or regional fundamentalism. We have to see this from an internationalist and class perspective. We are at a historic juncture where workers are realizing the injustices in their living conditions and the power they have when they stop the capitalists’ production. Demanding a cease-fire from a fascist nation is not enough. To eradicate fascism, we must fight its capitalist roots. We have the capacity to create a new system free of exploitation. This will be achieved by building a communist society. It is time to organize and fight against capitalism in all its manifestations!
Long live free and communist Palestine! Long live the international working class! The workers’ struggles have no borders! The working class has no borders!