Due to yet another bloody escalation of the conflict that has begun on the 7th of October 2023 between the Islamic fundamentalists of Hamas and the state of Israel, the Central Committee of the RKSM(b) considers it necessary to give its evaluation on these events.
The people of Palestine has been existing in the conditions of inhuman and criminal imperialist oppression for decades. Millions of Palestinians, one generation after another, are forced to live in exile while their homeland is occupied by Israel. With no other choice and no rights, hundreds of thousands of these people have to struggle for survival in refugee camps in Lebanon. They are deprived of their right to decent labour, healthcare, education, more or less comfortable housing and many more. Millions of other Palestinians are trapped into small parts of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.
The Israeli economic blockade deliberately imposed on the Gaza Strip more than 15 years to preserve the living conditions there at extremely low level has been contributing to the strengthening of Hamas’ reactionary power. Under the pretext of fighting the militants of this radical-right, extremist organisation, the Israeli authorities regularly suppress the peaceful Palestinian protests in the bloodiest of ways. It is up to the bourgeois authorities of Israel to decide, based on the interests of Israeli capital, what goods and in what amounts can be imported in and exported from the Gaza Strip. The Access Restricted Area (ARA) implemented and occasionally expanded in Gaza by the Israeli authorities covers approximately 35% of fertile agricultural land in the Gaza Strip and about 85% of its maritime space. Under the threat of death, Palestinians are not allowed to cultivate those lands nor can they use the waters within ARA for fishing. Regular military operations, including missile attacks carried out by the Israeli ‘defence’ army under the pretext of fighting Hamas militants, have taken the lives of Palestinian civilians, destroyed homes, urban, industrial and agricultural infrastructure.
The territory of the West Bank, de jure recognised as autonomous Palestinian territory, is in fact being more and more occupied every year by Israeli ‘settlements’, whose construction is accompanied by terror, murder and eviction of Palestinians. Those ‘settlements’ are being built into Palestinian land not because the people of Israel do not have enough space to live, but because Israel’s private capital, like any other, seeks to make even greater profits.
The chauvinist ideology of Zionism that is being imposed by the Israeli monopolies on the working people to foster the hostile attitudes in them towards the Palestinian arabs hides the actual contradictions common to the stage of imperialism:
For many decades, the State of Israel has been a reliable protector of the imperialist interests of US and EU in the Middle East and North Africa, including by assisting the world’s largest terrorist organisation, NATO, in fomenting wars and coups d’état. This alliance of imperialist forces is pursuing its plans to consolidate and expand its power over markets, logistics and production in the region at the cost of countless lives, destroyed cities, suffering and the forced migration of entire peoples.
The media of the ‘civilised’ West spread the lies and hypocrisy to defend the interests of imperialist capital and conceal the criminal and inhuman essence of the Israeli occupation of Palestine. The Israeli authorities try to show every attempt of the Palestinian people to fight back, every act of their national liberation struggle as acts of terrorism and savage atrocities. Meanwhile, every missile attack of the Israeli army on residential areas of Gaza, every shelling of demonstrations and protests of unarmed Palestinians is presented as Israel’s right to ‘self-defence’. Despite their contrived discontent with the ‘collective West’, the Russian authorities are driven by the same interests of large monopolies and try to sit on two chairs in their propaganda. For example, in 2017, at the 19th World Festival of Youth and Students in Sochi, bypassing the international youth festival movement and its collective bodies, bypassing the World Federation of Democratic Youth, the Russian authorities invited the youth of the ultra-nationalist Zionist Likud party (whose leader to this day is the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu), which caused a scandal at the festival itself. At the same time, the Russian president speaks of “the need to create a sovereign Palestinian state, <…> taking into account the fundamental interests of the Palestinian people”.
As ever before, the RKSM(b) urges the Russian youth and the youth around the world to support the Palestinian people and their struggle for liberation from the oppression and occupation by Israeli authorities! We condemn the Israeli army’s inhumane military massacres of Palestinian civilians! We condemn the Israeli army’s destruction of civilian infrastructure and homes in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank! We condemn the illegal, occupying Israeli ‘settlements’, the expulsion of Palestinians from their homes! We demand an end to the bandit occupation of Palestinian lands and demand the right for Palestinian refugees to return safely to their homeland! We condemn the illegal imprisonment of Palestinians in Israel, many of whom are imprisoned without a court order! We demand the immediate release of political prisoners who are fighting for the liberation of the Palestinian people from Israeli prisons! We condemn Israel’s total blockade of the Gaza Strip, cutting off water, electricity and food supplies to the inhabitants of Gaza! We condemn all imperialist forces that use the Palestinian people as a bargaining chip in the struggle among themselves!
Expressing our solidarity with the liberation struggle of the oppressed Palestinian people, we call for this struggle to be waged with an awareness of the class nature of the violence of the State of Israel and the traitorous role of the Palestinian bourgeoisie, which is prepared to trade Palestinian lives for its own interests and those of foreign capital.
The national oppression of Palestinian Arabs by the State of Israel goes hand in hand with the class oppression of Israeli workers. Rising prices and low wages lead to the decline of living standards, while the lack of social protection worsens the situation further. Given the class divisions and social inequality, this has led to mass protests throughout 2023. The Israeli working class is acting with determination and courage, using direct action such as road closures and strikes. At the same time, the masses are also making political demands, defending the principles of bourgeois democracy as well as opposing, among other things, discrimination against the Arab population by the Israeli State. In these conditions, the newly started military actions are becoming a convenient occasion for the consolidation of the whole society against the ‘external threat’ under the flag of the Israeli bourgeoisie. We call on the working class and the masses of the people of Israel to resist the attempts of the Israeli bourgeoisie to blur the class contradictions with an idea of national unity and continue the struggle against ‘their’ capitalists supporting the Palestinian people in their struggle for real independence. Capitalist Israel does not deserve any support from the workers of Israel and Palestine, and, thus, both peoples must fight against it.
At the same time, the RKSM(b) considers it wrong to identify the predatory interests of groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah with the aspirations of the people of Palestine. In the current conflict, they put their interests above the interests of the people and, therefore, will not lead them to liberation – at the stage of imperialism, there can be no unity in the struggle for liberation between the proletariat, which represents the interests of the entire working people, and the bourgeoisie, whose will is represented by Islamic fundamentalists. The bourgeoisie and its reactionary formations will betray the aspirations of the people at the first suitable opportunity for the sake of their own enrichment. Historically, various political forces took part in the struggle of the Palestinian people, including those with a declared socialist orientation, for example, the Palestinian National Liberation Movement (Fatah), which received help and support from the Soviet Union. However, with the collapse of the USSR, the radical Islamist forces such as Hamas or the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which today control most of Gaza territory, have won the struggle for power.
Moreover, RKSM(b) considers it wrong to look at the escalation of violence in the Gaza Strip solely as a local conflict, because this violence simultaneously expresses both the political crisis in Israel and the clash of interests of various imperialist forces in the region. For example, Iran is closely connected with the Lebanese Shia movement Hezbollah, providing them with money and weapons, and with the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, while Hamas also has connections with the highest representatives of the Iranian state. The Russian ruling class, in turn, is interested in promoting Hamas, since this undermines the hegemony of the Israeli as well as American and European monopolies in the region and allows it to strengthen its influence instead.
We should not forget that the general weakening of the imperialist US, NATO and the EU is also beneficial to their main competitor – the financial oligarchy of China which has great interests in the region. The Ukrainian trade corridor of the Chinese BRI is one of the routes through which China aims to strengthen its dominance in Europe. The war in Ukraine has complicated its development, but there is another corridor that runs through the Middle East, and therefore Chinese capital has its own objective interests in increasing its presence here. It is China that is developing a plan to create an oil and gas pipeline from the south of Iran to the Mediterranean through the territory of Iraq, Syria and Libya. Control over the Suez Canal and the entire Red Sea is gradually passing into the hands of BRICS in which China has one of the key positions. As a result of the Hamas attacks, operations at the port of Ashkelon and Israel’s second largest gas field called Tamar, which are largely dominated by American corporations, were suspended. At the same time, despite the current fierce fighting, the ports of Ashdod and Haifa, where the Chinese monopolies increase their presence, continue to operate. If you look at the national liberation wars in the context of the global imperialist system, which is what communists are obliged to do, then the interests of various imperialist groups are visible to the naked eye.
Thus, the war in the Gaza Strip, alongside the wars and armed conflicts in Ukraine, Nagorno-Karabakh, and other regions, is involved in the global imperialist confrontation. Hamas and similar organizations use the national liberation aspirations of the Palestinian Arabs in their own interests and the interests of the imperialists. They are putting the just struggle of the people against the occupiers in a reactionary ideological shell, initiating terrorist attacks and bloody crimes against civilians, such as the shooting and capture of visitors of the NovaTribe music festival. In this regard, their actions resemble those of the fascist collaborators – the Banderites – during the years of the Polish occupation of Western Ukraine, inciting national and religious hatred among the people and hiding the class basis of national oppression.
The unresolvable contradictions of the stage of imperialism and the global crisis of the imperialist system are increasingly manifested in an unprecedented rise of inflation and the critical impoverishment of the masses, increased exploitation of the working class, the development of the labour movement and class struggle, the escalation of bloody conflicts, the increase in expenditures of the imperialist states and their satellites on armaments and re-equipping their armies. All these processes are pushing the global imperialist system towards a world war for the third time, in which the large financial monopolies of the whole world will once again try to resolve the accumulated contradictions at the expense of the suffering and blood of the working people and the masses.
Based on Marxist-Leninist theory, we are convinced that peace and brotherhood between peoples are impossible in the system of imperialism – they can only be achieved through mutual recognition of the right of peoples to self-determination and joint struggle against imperialism. The imperialist system and the imperialists themselves do not need peace either in Palestine or Ukraine, or any other current centre of conflict. In the imperialist competitive struggle of monopolies, there are no parties interested in protecting the Palestinian or any other people. All sides enrich themselves through violence against peoples.
Only the peoples themselves, all working people led by the proletariat, can liberate themselves! The workers of the oppressing countries must lend a hand to the oppressed peoples, and the oppressed peoples must rely on the workers of the oppressing countries, because their only enemy is capitalism, and their only salvation is socialism and communism!
Central Committee of the RKSM(b)