Above: Gaza City in October 2023, at the start of the ongoing siege; photo by Hassan Eslaiah/AP.
The Palestinian genocide represents a critical point in the struggle against imperialism, not just for the Palestinians themselves but for everyone who’s part of this fight. For us communists in the empire’s heart, the genocide is our great test, both morally and in terms of practical movement-building. For the workers movement in the USA to survive, we’ll have to take Palestine seriously, because if the state can crush the pro-Palestine movement then it will crush the workers struggle too. Any pro-labor forces which shy away from the issue of Palestine won’t be rewarded for their opportunism; the state will only take advantage of their cowardice, and assail them even harder. It’s a situation of “first they came for the Palestinians”; either we commit to solidarity, or we lose. These are the stakes within our struggle’s new stage, where the imperial state is working to expand its extermination campaign, prepare for war with China, and smash opposition towards these projects.
Right now, both wings of our ruling class are working to criminalize pro-Palestinian sentiments, collaborating on plans for deporting students who protest against the genocide and classifying anti-Zionist groups as terrorist organizations. The U.S. Treasury Department has advanced this effort by putting the “terrorist” label onto Samidoun, the network for Palestinian prisoners. Our class enemies feel they’re behind on the project to suppress dissent, especially now that the Uhuru organization has beaten the charges against it. These recent repressive acts are meant to preclude much more radical attacks on free speech, attacks that will correspond to the empire’s next war escalations.
If we can overcome the next phase of anti-Palestine repression, and continue building a mass movement against imperialism, then our class enemies won’t be able to advance their next schemes; which will put us in place to overthrow them. But this will require facing all the tasks which this new phase of the struggle demands, no matter how daunting they are.
It will mean risking persecution for the sake of solidarity; it will mean preparing to take our operations underground if need be; it will mean subordinating our individual interests to the cause. As Kim Il Sung said: “The social revolution cannot be achieved as easily as proceeding along a royal road in full daylight, nor can it progress as smoothly as a boat sailing before the wind. On the path of revolution, there may be rough thorny bushes and turns and twists, and there may be temporary setbacks and partial sacrifices. To flinch before difficulties and to hesitate in the revolution for fear of sacrifices is not the attitude befitting a revolutionary.” If we commit to this mission, we’ll make the U.S. empire’s genocidal offensive backfire upon it; that will be the reward for all of our sacrifices.
There’s come to be massive potential for progress, because in many respects the imperial hegemon has grown weak. There’s no way for it to reverse the trend towards multipolarity, and its recent victory in Syria has actually accelerated this process; Washington will now need to devote more of its resources to West Asia, which frustrates its plans in all areas. When the imperialists launched their new cold war, they didn’t intend to get involved in more military quagmires; the plan was to destabilize Eurasia through hybrid warfare. But their Ukraine proxy war has made Washington even further lose its primacy, and their offensive throughout West Asia is now setting back the plans for a war in Taiwan.
The empire’s crimes against the Palestinians, as well as the Lebanese, the Yemenis, the Syrians, and the Iranians, are all motivated by a desire to compensate for these strategic losses. That Washington’s Zionist proxies are driven by racial hatred, and seek to cleanse the region of undesirables, is perfectly convenient for the U.S. monopolists; they want to destroy the region so that China has its trade routes cut off, and Zionism’s Hitlerian mission aligns with this goal. The hope of the imperialists is that if they demolish enough infrastructure across West Asia, and keep countries like Syria economically weak, then the Belt and Road Initiative will be ruined. But for as successful as they are in this extermination, they continue to lose within Eastern Europe and East Asia. And those are the strategic fronts in this world war; West Asia is a tactical front. History’s overall trajectory is in favor of China, and Washington’s maneuvers in West Asia are unintentionally helping the PRC.
Yet we continue to face a great danger: the possibility that this genocide won’t be met with sufficient resistance, which would both condemn millions more to death while prolonging the existence of the imperial state. To prevent this, we in the USA must fight in tandem with the Palestinians, and with the others who are resisting Zionism’s offensive.
The struggles of West Asia’s masses, and the struggle of the USA’s masses, are connected in an extremely acute way. It’s a shared fight, where if one side fails, the other side will necessarily suffer. The targets of this genocide are relying on us, because it’s our government that’s behind the extermination effort. And the more successful the genocide becomes, the worse of a place our own class struggle is; thus why the anti-Palestine opportunists within the workers movement are digging their own grave.
With every new crime against humanity that our government facilitates, our movement shows its present shortcomings; as those within the empire’s heart, we absolutely have the power to harm the workings of the empire’s war machine, and if the genocide is still expanding then we’re not using that power. We’re not being allowed to use that power, because our social movements have been captured by opportunistic forces; forces that have abandoned the Palestinians as soon as solidarity has become inconvenient.
What these opportunists have done is allow the genocide to drift out of the national conversation. To fight this genocide, we must continuously force it into into the center of the discourse; that’s the only action which has ever had a real effect on the events in Gaza. For a time, the extermination was slowed, because the Zionist entity experienced constant scrutiny within mainstream U.S. discourse. Gaza was regularly discussed in the U.S. news cycle, which Netanyahu’s government watches closely. And the student Palestine protests acted to keep Gaza in that spotlight, which proves the tactics of these protests were overall correct. The problem was that the biggest anti-genocide actions couldn’t be sustained, largely because of the new repressive rules from universities. The outcome was that Gaza could be taken out of the news cycle, letting the massacres become even more frequent.
Obviously slowing down the genocide wasn’t good enough. But if this obstruction of the mass murder had continued, we could have built upon the momentum from those initial Palestine actions, and the movement would have turned into a larger problem for the empire. Instead, the movement’s progress got interrupted, and the slaughter could be multiplied.
There was a way for the pro-Palestine movement’s leaders to avoid this, even amid the heightened repression. PSL, DSA, and the rest of the organized left could have continued to center Palestine, but instead they switched their main focus towards building an anti-Trump movement. They also could have consistently and aggressively fought against the Syria regime change narratives, which have let Washington overthrow Assad; but today’s organized U.S. left is not serious about anti-imperialism. And this lack of principles has led to the destruction of a crucial asset for the Palestinian cause, further emboldening the aggressors.
The organized left’s energy and resources have stopped primarily being focused on Palestine. Overwhelmingly, they’ve been going towards the anti-Trump movement, which is a diversion from the struggle’s truly important areas. The left has failed to mount a serious resistance to this extermination campaign, and it’s because of this that the left has become largely irrelevant during the new Trump era; at this point, I only talk about the left’s failures so that we can learn from them. And the essential lesson from these failures is that we must take on all the costs of principled anti-genocide resistance.
The multipolar forces are bringing the imperial beast towards a point where it can be defeated. And in many parts of the globe, it’s already been beaten. Should we fulfill our role in the liberation struggle, the enemy’s crimes against the Arab and Persian worlds will bring about its own downfall. As the anti-Zionist resistance regroups in new forms, and the Zionist entity’s collapse continues, the USA’s people will combat the empire from the inside. This will ensure that the plans for war in East Asia get thwarted, as well as bring America far closer towards its revolutionary moment. We can save millions of lives while advancing the class struggle to its next stage, if we meet our next tasks without flinching.
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