Note: I am not Anti-Semitic in any way. I am opposed to all forms of bigotry and racial/ethnic discrimination. This blogpost is dedicated to my personal views and knowledge of Anti-Imperialism against the state of Israel and the West. Thank you for reading. Sincerely, Anthony.
The primary threat to the liberty of the Arab working people is of course the United States and the state of Israel. The opposition to the Palestinian peoples can thus be interpreted as acts to preserve the Israeli territorial imperialism and Western semi-colonisation represented by oligarchic Arab oil barons and American politicians. I shall now proceed to explain why, in my viewpoint of the matter, the movement which emerged in 19th century Britain known as Zionism was born out of racism and is now only useful to maintain Western dominance over post-colonies in the Near East.
In order to start of, it should be noted what Zionism is to better understand the movement of anti-imperialism against Israel. Zionism is a political ideology mainly based on ethnic, religious, and cultural identity which emerged in the second half of the 19th century with the goal of establishing a permanent homeland of the Jewish people in the region of Palestine. Zionism is not actually a tenant of Judaism, as it is written in the Torah that the Jewish people shall not claim a state until the messiah arrives to grant it to them. It is instead a tool used by the great powers of the West to gain a considerable level of economic leverage and military dominance over the region. When you consider the fact that the Near East has a significant amount of natural resources, specifically petroleum and natural gas, this of course makes perfect sense. However, most Jews have found being themselves subjugated to conform to the beliefs of the warmongering, bigoted, and perilous structure of neo-colonialism, hence the reason the Jewish people are mostly ignorant of the nature of the system and why they should be opposed to it. This is also why people who strongly believe in Zionism will claim you are an Anti-Semite if you happen to not stand with Israel. Standing against a nation state that is massacring the Palestinian people to maintain dominance over the natural resources and have political supremacy over the region isn’t hatred of the people who live in said country. It is not just a criticism of the state, but an opposition towards racism and territorial expansion.
Next, imperialism and colonialism must be properly defined. Colonialism is defined as the policy and practice of acquiring complete or partial political control over a set territory with the purpose of exploiting the territory economically. The colonialism of the 19th century and previous to that does have similarities to modern imperialism, however, they are very different. Imperialism is a certain response to the contradictions of capitalism inherent to the system. As the rate of profit has a tendency to fall as competition in the market and innovation and automation of labour occur, increasing the ratio of machine capital to human labour which drives down wages and lowers consumption, capitalism enters stages of decadency and crisis. This decadency can be seen in the form of very severe economic recession or depression, such as the panics and crises of 1929 and 2008. Capitalists can no longer acquire a profit from exploiting workers in their home country. Industrialists must then turn to the economic exploitation of the developing world for their cheap labour and natural resources in order to sustain profitability. Vladimir Lenin marked imperialism as containing these characteristics:
1. Change in the function of capital: The exportation and importation of capital between countries, similar to the commerce of consumer goods.
2. Changes in the conventional form of capital: The merging of industrial capital and banking capital for the formation of financial capital.
3. Suppression of free market competition: The creation of monopolies, oligopolies, cartels, and trusts dominating the economy and pursuing a collective interest on a profit basis.
4. Rise of the Banking System: Owners of banks will buy extremely large amounts of shares of stock in industry to dominate over the economy.
5. Political, Economic, Cultural, and Military domination by the developed most advanced capitalist great powers of the developing world for their cheap labour and natural resources.
6. A “Labour Aristocracy” being created in the West, supported by the toiling wage slaves of the underdeveloped overexploited earth. These much better off workers will begin to align with their bosses and class consciousness will be destroyed.
The primary world contradiction under capitalism, that a worker can never buy back the full value of their own labour, is what makes capitalism an inherently unstable and unsustainable system. It is the evil and greedy ventures of colonialism, war, and imperialism which have delayed the triumph of the worker’s struggle in the creation of world socialism. First, Latin America is divided into puppet and client regimes ruled by dictatorial tyrants in the interests of the United Fruit Company, suppressing trade unionism and using their militaries to kill workers who toiled in slave-like conditions for attempting to gain their labour rights. Now, as the global petroleum industry plays a major role in the American economy, the Near East, which has been under the influence of the West since the Great War, is carved up and threatened by the United States military in the pursuit of profit.
While Labour Zionism, the left-wing of Zionist politics, dominated Israel’s government well into the 1970’s, this progressive, egalitarian, and worker oriented ideology still excluded Palestinian Arabs from the process of attempting to construct a Socialist or Social-Democratic society. Modern Zionism in Israel possesses a nationalistic mentality, contributing to the Apartheid system affecting the Palestinians. Under the Right-Wing Nationalist government of Israel, Palestinians have suffered through extrajudicial killings, mass detentions, housing demolitions, forced migration, relocation, and large-scale deportations. Increasing Jewish settlements of Palestinian territory have been resisted with civil disobedience and non-violent protesting on a widespread scale, to be dealt with by the state of Israel with military deployments and massacres of those who took matters into their own hands.
The state of Israel is a major part of the West’s neo-colonial and geopolitical strategy in the Near East. Its government aids in counterterrorism against Anti-Western groups to defend the financial interests of American and European economic elites. Israel wishes to impede the natural gas revenues in Gaza from continuing to be in the hands of groups such as Hamas as they are not submitting to the Israeli interests. We must put an end to the lobbying agenda which reflects Israel’s political establishment and exercises influence of the West. Israeli society has thrived via the dehumanisation of the Palestinian Arab Muslims and Christians. By dividing the Israelis and Palestinians by seeing each other as enemies, a rather significant portion of Israeli society has lost all empathy for the Arabs, providing a justification for their maltreatment and genocide.
The right-wing, ethnocentric, and bourgeois nationalist Zionism has been proven to be incompatible with parliamentary democracy as it would lead to the creation of a multinational state where different ethnicities could peacefully coexist under a shared political institution. It can then be inferred that Zionists in government would not willingly agree to grant different ethnic and religious groups the same civil liberties as Zionist Jews. This can partially explain why the Israeli political establishment has chosen to blatantly ignore international law and pursue a path of colonialist war and an ethnic policy of Apartheid. Western countries are politically and economically incapable of attempting to stop or even opposing the actions of the state of Israel. It is civilians all around the world that are the best hope in placing political pressure on Israel to once and for all, create better economic conditions for the working people of the Near East.
Socialism is Humanism! 