This is from the book that I’m writing, which will be called “When Tears Can’t Save Them: Why The Pro-Palestine Movement Failed To Stop A Holocaust, And How It Can Still Win.”
In November 2025, leading Communist Party of Israel member Ofer Cassif made a speech to the Communist Party of Britain’s 58th Congress. One of the core arguments he made was that there had been a “takeover of fascism” within the Zionist state. Another one was that “The Palestinians have no time to wait for one state,” and therefore “Those who support a one-state solution actually deny the Palestinian people their national self-determination.”
Cassif said this at a moment when the pro-Palestine movement was seeking a new direction amid both recent strategic victories, and looming new threats. In early October, another ceasefire agreement had been reached, with this one supposed to be the deal that would bring sustainable peace. The Zionist entity of course never intended to let this happen, and it had been continuing to bomb Gaza in preparation for its next escalations. Due to the determination of the resistance to minimize violence, though, the ceasefire hadn’t so far fallen apart, and the pro-Palestine movement was in a moment of transition. Gaza wasn’t as much in the discourse as it had been during the worst months of the genocide, but there was a widespread global desire to assist in the rebuilding efforts, and to help ensure the ceasefire would last.
The ceasefire was itself a product of the strength the resistance had demonstrated, and this victory opened up new opportunities for Palestine’s allies around the world. But there were forces that sought to direct Palestine sympathizers towards a pro-normalization agenda. And key parts of these forces existed in the communist movement, with a key player in this effort being the Communist Party of Greece (KKE).
In its statement from after October 9, the KKE put forth a position that would come to have greater relevance in this later phase of the genocide, when Gaza was seeking recovery and Palestine supporters were looking for a path forward. The KKE had argued that we must view the people of the Zionist state as victims alongside the Palestinians; an idea that would be used to support not just the “Israel has fallen to fascism” notion, but also the narrative that supporting the abolition of Zionism does harm to the Palestinians. Said the KKE:
The USA and the EU found their much-needed ally in the Israeli bourgeoisie and in its state, which gave them the right of arbitration together with the other bourgeois classes of the region, which also wanted to enhance their position. This geopolitical game, which has been played out in even more dramatic terms since the overthrow of socialism in the USSR, has as its victim an entire people, the Palestinian people, who have been promised a homeland all these years but whose dream remains unfulfilled. The people of Israel are also paying the prise because they are victims of the policies of the Israeli bourgeoisie and its state. The KKE expresses its solidarity with the Communist Party of Israel, with the communists of Israel, Jews and Arabs, who are currently struggling in the lion’s den and raising a voice of resistance to the barbarity against the people of Palestine.
The KKE has expressed its full solidarity and support for the Palestinian people, for the need to have their own state and to be masters in their own land. At the same time, it emphasized that the the [sic] Israeli people are also a victim of the policies of the bourgeois state of Israel and the reactionary Netanyahu government. This statement was met with hostility by certain forces of the “World Anti-Imperialist Platform”, which do not recognize the existence of the state of Israel, nor the existence of the Israeli bourgeoisie and the Israeli people, calling it a US base that must be destroyed. These forces refuse to see that the root cause of everything that the peoples are experiencing is the barbaric exploitative system in its current stage, the monopoly one, where the struggle between the monopolies and the bourgeois classes is intensifying and is being waged by all means, for the exploitation not only of the workers of their countries but also of other countries for raw materials, transport routes for the commodities, geopolitical footholds and market shares. And the bourgeois state of Israel and its bourgeoisie is such a geopolitical foothold for the USA and the EU and not only a military base.
To understand why this argument is wrong, and therefore why all other labor Zionist arguments are wrong as well, you have to look at which class category working “Israelis” truly fall into. When I say “Israelis,” I’m principally talking about the social class within Palestine which has a colonizer role, that being Jewish “Israelis.” The Arabs who the Zionist entity has given citizenship are nominally “Israelis,” but unlike the colonizer class, these citizens don’t enjoy the legal and material benefits that are only fully accessible to Jews within Palestine.
It’s the Jewish “Israelis” whose status as proletarians is under interrogation here, and who the KKE is principally referring to when it seeks to make the case that “Israeli people are also a victim”; since they’re the only ones who the Zionist state treats as full human beings, they’re the appropriate focus of this class analysis. And when we apply such a dialectical analysis to the role that Jewish “Israeli” workers play, we find they’re not proletarians, but are in fact part of an outright slaveocracy. One that’s built upon the labor of the only proletarians in Palestine, which are the indigenous people who’ve been forced into a status of slave-wage servitude.
According to the crudely economistic view that the KKE espouses, Jewish workers in Palestine are proletarians, just because they (superficially) fit the most surface-level Marxist definition of “proletarian”; that being someone who makes a living by selling their labor. Yet for this definition to really apply to the Jewish workers in Palestine, we would need to forget about another essential class definition within Marxism, which is the aristocracy of labor. By quoting Engels, Lenin illustrated which part the labor aristocrats play within the imperialist structure, and how the unions were able to make these workers “better situated” to the extent that they’d become on the level of the bourgeoisie:
In a letter to Marx, dated October 7, 1858, Engels wrote: “...The English proletariat is actually becoming more and more bourgeois, so that this most bourgeois of all nations is apparently aiming ultimately at the possession of a bourgeois aristocracy and a bourgeois proletariat alongside the bourgeoisie. For a nation which exploits the whole world this is of course to a certain extent justifiable”…That these ideas, which were repeated by Engels over the course of decades, were so expressed by him publicly, in the press, is proved by his preface to the second edition of The Condition of the Working Class in England, 1892. Here he speaks of an “aristocracy among the working class”, of a “privileged minority of the workers”, in contradistinction to the “great mass of working people”. “A small, privileged, protected minority” of the working class alone was “permanently benefited” by the privileged position of England in 1848–68, whereas “the great bulk of them experienced at best but a temporary improvement”.... “With the break-down of that [England’s industrial] monopoly, the English working class will lose that privileged position...” The members of the “new” unions, the unions of the unskilled workers, “had this immense advantage, that their minds were virgin soil, entirely free from the inherited ‘respectable’ bourgeois prejudices which hampered the brains of the better situated ‘old unionists’” .... “The so-called workers’ representatives” in England are people “who are forgiven their being members of the working class because they themselves would like to drown their quality of being workers in the ocean of their liberalism...”
This phenomenon of certain unions within the imperialist countries fostering a labor aristocracy is applicable here because though “Israel” isn’t an imperialist country, it is a country whose favored class of workers owe absolutely everything they have to the exploitation of an underclass. And Histadrut is the organization that’s filled this exact role of a union which transfers stolen wealth to the privileged layer of workers. Histadrut perfectly fits that criteria because its role in the bribery is so direct and blatant, it doesn’t even function like a traditional union does; it’s a category all of its own. Histradrut isn’t a real labor union, in that its role is not to give the workers a means for actively asserting themselves against the employers; instead, it’s always served as a means for carrying out social development that pertains to the Zionist colonizers who work.
Why has the Zionist entity never had the need for a genuine labor union? Because the workers who its labor structure is designed to benefit are not proletarians. They’re individuals who get compensated for their labor entirely at the expense of Palestine’s actual proletariat. When it comes to the Jewish “Israeli” workers, the employee vs. employer contradiction looks fundamentally different than it does in any place which isn’t the world’s last proper settler-colonial state. Whenever this contradiction comes up, the way in which it’s resolved is unique, because only in “Israel” does the union respond to the demands of the workers by simply providing more colonial gains to them.
Only in “Israel” is there such a blatant ethnic stratification, one which cultivates a population of bribed workers whose wealth is entirely founded on slavery. Like “Israel,” the U.S. is also a slave state, and it does still have a labor aristocracy; but the majority of its workers are no longer part of this aristocracy, which was always going to enter into such a decline. America has been able to develop into a society with a multiracial proletariat, whereas in “Israel” the proletariat is by definition limited to those who stand below the ethnic aristocracy.
What is the KKE really saying, then, when it talks about how Jewish “Israelis” have been victimized by Netanyahu’s policies? It’s saying that the Histradrut should have been allowed to distribute more colonial resources to the Jewish colonizers who work. The KKE’s position is not to stand against Zionism, but to side with one of the factions within Zionism; that being the “labor” faction, which has been pushed to the margins and therefore can present itself as distinct from the “fascist” kind of Zionism.
Zionism is so foundationally tied in with an agenda of genocide that it’s completely redundant, and in fact harmful, to classify certain Zionist currents as “fascist” while implying that other currents represent something humane or progressive. Such is the trick that’s being pulled by the KKE’s camp within the global communist movement: construct a narrative in which there are “good” Zionists who represent the proletarian cause, and who can supposedly serve as allies to the Palestinians. I phrase it as “the KKE’s camp” because among these labor Zionist parties, the leadership of Greece’s communist party plays a pivotal role.
This leadership has a platform that’s able to influence numerous other communist formations, especially throughout Europe. It in part gained this platform through the International Meeting of Communist and Workers’ Parties, which the KKE set up in 1998 as a way of regrouping the world’s heavily damaged communist movement. The ways in which the KKE has been effective, namely when it comes to worker organizing, have been exploited by the elements within its leadership that support labor Zionism; and it’s evident that these elements have won out within the party’s structure, which is democratic centralist in a way that’s deeply hostile towards dissenting views.
It’s in this environment, where one small clique inside global communism can exercise greatly outsized influence, that dogmatic opportunism has been allowed to thrive. And the consequence is that the communist movement, or at least one of its major tendencies, has hitched itself to the controlled opposition wing within Zionism. The only way the pro-Palestine movement can throw off the grip of this labor Zionist current—and thereby overcome a major barrier to getting connected with the workers movement—is by building up alternative organizational forces. Entryism into these corrupted communist parties is not the right strategy; we must focus on creating structures that are already controlled by principled pro-Palestine forces.
To carry out this project, we must combat the efforts by the labor Zionists to redefine Zionism. According to them, somebody can support the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine while not being a Zionist, as long as they do so for the right reasons; those reasons being a desire for independence from imperialism, and for this Jewish state to develop into socialism. For one example of the arguments labor Zionists make to support this narrative, here is a 2022 article from 972 Magazine, which asserts that there’s a “nationalism beyond Zionism” among certain Jews who fought in the 1948 war:
…even the Jewish Communists in America did not deny a new national identity in Palestine. Alexander Bittelman, a member of the Communist Party in the US who worked with Jews in the party in the 1940s, wrote that, “Communists can – and must – carry on the fight for national independence of their people, not as bourgeois nationalists but working-class internationalists.” (“Israel and the World Struggle for Peace and Democracy” 1948). The tide of history was too strong, however; national chauvinism won the day.
What was this non- or anti-Zionist Jewish identity the Communists wanted to create? It was not anti-statist per se: many Jewish Communists fought in the 1948 war. The identity, at its core, was “Jewish” but not exclusivist in terms of the state’s structure, and binationalist in principle. The Jewish Communists were committed to a Jewish internationalist class struggle staged from Palestine/Israel. Locker-Biletzki interestingly notes, “not unlike sections of Haredi society, [the communists] professed a limited loyalty to the state, defending its independence from imperialism while negating its Zionist ideological core.” In both cases, one can be a Jewish collectivist of sorts, and not a Zionist. Thus Meir Vilner, the head of MAKI, the Israeli Communist Party in 1948, was a signatory to Israel’s Declaration of Independence and a long-standing Knesset member. Similarly, the non-Zionist Agudat Israel could agree to become part of the transgressive secular state.
To understand why this Jewish nationalism absolutely is Zionist, we have to investigate what Zionism means at its core. To be a Zionist proper, you need to practice Zionism by physically living in Palestine; which in practical terms was always going to mean the creation of an exclusivistic Jewish state, regardless of the preferences of those who took part in the Zionist project. When we’re following Zionism’s strict definition, most of the people around the globe who call themselves Zionists are not actually Zionists; rather they’re Jewish supremacists. These “non-Zionists” have not only lived in Palestine, but they’ve participated in efforts to construct and preserve the Zionist state, and the party they created continues to uphold these efforts as having been justified.
For the working-class and pro-Palestine movements to escape Zionist co-optation, our ranks must face the reality of just how marginal anti-Zionism truly is within “Israeli” society. We need to recognize that Palestine’s liberation will have to come from forces external to “Israel”; this is what it means to understand settler-colonialism as it exists in today’s world. “Israel” can never change into a state that’s stopped subjugating the Palestinians, because the only role “Israel” was ever designed to have is a mercenary colony. This has to do with how the Zionist project came about so late within the process of colonialism; because colonialism had already become ripe to shed its old form by the time “Israel” was founded, and the brazenly supremacist logic of colonialism was falling out of style, the Zionists found themselves isolated. They came to run a society that exists in complete opposition to reality, and is dependent on endless war.
“Israel,” specifically Jewish society within “Israel,” was always going to be an eight-million-member cult. The liberal or “labor” Zionist attempts to soften this cult’s image, and convince Palestine supporters we can negotiate our way into peace with the occupier, serve to pull the pro-Palestine movement into the political margins. Because there’s no way the ideals of these “progressive” Zionists and “non-Zionists” can be realized, the only effect they can have is to weaken the Palestinian cause.
Marxists and other Palestine supporters must keep watch for this kind of insidious tactic, particularly when it’s directed towards our movement through the “non-Zionist” label; the fact that these political actors feel the need to soften their phrasing when it comes to opposing Zionism is a sign of something being amiss. Publications like 972 Magazine (which is named after the area code for occupied Palestine) are guided by the idea that the more collaboration there is between Palestinians and “Israeli” Jews, the more that things will be able to advance towards peace. But for Zionists, including “progressive” Zionists, “peace” means the surrender of those who are fighting against Palestine’s extermination and subjugation. Once you embrace this mindset that “peace dialogue” will in itself bring progress, or that you can find allies of Palestine on the Zionist side, you’ve taken the anti-colonial character out of your political project.
The rationale which the labor Zionists use is that they’re not promoting Zionism, because supposedly there exists a kind of socialist politics that views “Israel” as a real country yet functions outside the Zionist sphere. And this is certainly a dishonest rhetorical tactic with contradictory reasoning; but because of how deceptive it is, if we keep engaging with it we’ll end up having a circular argument. Our task is not to force crypto-Zionists to admit that they’re Zionists. When you’re engaging with someone who’s speaking in bad faith, and will always come up with another reason for why they’re not actually doing the thing they’re doing, you need to focus on exposing them as bad-faith. And in our case, the efforts to expose those we’re fighting against need to be secondary to the efforts at constructing a political alternative for the masses.
We know where the root of the labor Zionist problem is. Everywhere outside of occupied Palestine itself, labor Zionism gains its perceived legitimacy from a dogmatic adherence towards the position of the Soviet Union—or at least the position the USSR took during the era when “Israel” was created. For a communist party to have this dogmatic opportunist mentality, it needs to be detached from the world’s liberation struggles in crucial ways, and stuck within a practice of complacency which discourages growth. This was how the USSR’s ruling party came to lose the will for continuing the class struggle; and this collapse in motivation to defend socialism was related to the party’s earlier embrace of labor Zionism. Both came from crude economism, which narrowly focuses on struggles that are directly related to labor. This translated to viewing Palestine’s working colonizers as proletarians, just because they superficially appear to be so.
Whenever a communist party deteriorates ideologically, this has to do with a failure to keep its ranks rigorously educated; and when the organization’s priorities aren’t adequately focused around education, this comes from a lack of sufficient concern for advancing the people’s interests. The only way to free our movements from these ills is by acting according to what the struggle truly demands, based on investigations that we constantly make into our conditions. And a critical part of this is synthesizing the class struggle with the anti-imperialist struggle, which aren’t the same thing but overlap on the vast majority of issues.
The error of the KKE, and those who follow in its dogmatic opportunism, is to view Palestine and “Israel” entirely through the lens of the employee vs. employer contradiction—as if there weren’t a bigger contradiction in this case, like the one between the slaves and the slavers. If we train ourselves to look at things holistically, and account for what the most relevant contradictions are, we will be able to build something that dwarfs any structures the labor Zionists have. That aligns itself with the liberation struggle which the actual people of Palestine are waging, and thereby cuts through all the deceptions of those who offer Palestine false salvation.
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