This July, the Palestine General Federation of Trade Unions put out a statement titled “A Cry Before Death.” To the world’s working masses, the Federation said:
We address you today once again, not merely as victims, but as the workers of Palestine: an integral part of the popular and working classes of this world, struggling for justice, liberation, and dignity. And we call upon you to:
Break the silence and complicity, raise your voices within your unions and federations, and denounce the policies of starvation, siege, and massacre in Gaza.
Pressure your governments to end arms deals and military cooperation with the occupation, and to impose sanctions on the Zionist settler-colonial and apartheid regime.
Boycott companies that support the occupation, and withdraw union investments from any company, institution, or entity involved in funding or profiting from the war.
Organize days of rage and global solidarity in factories and workshops, in ports and airports, in the streets and public squares, in support of Palestine and its brave people.
Should we succeed in spreading the Federation’s message widely enough, I truly believe this statement and statements like it are going to be just as impactful as their creators have hoped they will. Popular support for the Palestinian cause does exist throughout the United States, and the other countries whose governments are leading the extermination effort. The masses of these exploiter countries have been catching up with the Global South’s people in their consciousness about Palestine, and about the class struggle by extension.
For those who have revolutionary potential, and aren’t part of the Zionist cult, the genocide has become recognized as an urgent evil to combat. Which means that if we connect the U.S. masses with the struggle that Palestinians are waging, making this struggle’s ideas and projects accessible to Americans, many Americans will become participants in this struggle.
A large part of this consciousness shift happened a while ago, during the first months of the post-October 7 era. When the bulk of the people became exposed to Zionism’s crimes in a way they never had been, it became apparent that the Zionists had already lost the narrative war. Now, after the developments from these last few months, many are finding their way back to Palestine despite all the distractions our ruling class has since thrown out.
Everyone sees that a mass starvation is happening, and this has precipitated a new level of disillusionment among people across the political spectrum. Trump’s effort to cover up the Epstein story is connected to this transition; more Americans are figuring out that the sexual abuses our politicians engage in have been used as a tool for blackmail by the Zionist lobby. The people have come to see just how much leverage the genocide’s perpetrators hold over our government officials, and they’re looking for ways to combat this.
Now that the myth about Trump being an “enemy of the deep state” has been shattered in the minds of his base, there are new possibilities for mass mobilization and organization. There are also new risks of opportunists exploiting popular discontent; the propagators of the “Jewish question” narrative are trying to pick up support from alienated MAGA voters, and ultra-leftism is an ever-present problem within activist spaces. But if we make the Palestinian resistance and its adjacent worker movement into major sources of guidance for the masses, the masses will go in the right direction.
An important requirement is that the interests and views of these Palestinian revolutionary forces genuinely get represented in our discourse, rather than being warped by ultra-leftists with their own agendas and beliefs. According to the ultra-leftist view, the workers within the U.S. cannot participate in this revolt against Zionism, because these workers are supposedly labor aristocrats who lack a proletarian class character. Though ultra-leftism comes in different forms, this is a trait which is shared by all of its iterations: the attitude that the First World’s masses lack revolutionary potential, and must be treated as fundamentally reactionary.
Ultra-leftism isn’t right now the main ideological threat towards revolutionary politics, like it was in the Biden era; but it’s likely to become the main threat again at a later moment, and it’s always capable of corrupting pro-Palestinian activism. So as we work towards fulfilling the Palestinian union federation’s directives, we need to consciously steer this work away from the activist pitfalls that make organizing attempts fizzle out. Those of us in the imperial countries need to make a genuine effort at reaching the masses of our own countries; this is why I’ve framed anti-Zionism as a mission to defeat the Zionist lobby, which is the lens through which many Americans view the pro-Palestine struggle.
This lobby is the tool that our imperialist dictatorship uses to suppress efforts at voting out pro-Zionist politicians, and at stopping our tax dollars from funding the Zionist project. More of the USA’s people are making the connection between Zionism and Epstein, as well as recognizing how much Zionism has had to do with the wars our country has fought in recent decades; and the lobby is the force that they see preventing them from getting Zionism out of their government.
This is the way the bulk of the American masses think about the fight against Zionism: not as a fight that’s separate from America’s internal class conflicts, but as something that’s fundamentally tied to these conflicts. Which is of course true. But ultra-leftists recoil from discussing the struggle in these terms, because doing so is seen by them as necessarily reactionary and “antisemitic.” Which shows how these leftists overlap with liberal Zionists more than they’d like to think.
When we use popular anger towards the “Israel” lobby as an anti-Zionist rallying point, this does not reaffirm the “Jewish question” narrative—not if we’re doing so in a way that’s informed by dialectics. The influencers who talk about Zionism from a JQ angle are actually working to divert blame away from U.S. imperialism, and protect American finance capital by arguing the United States is simply controlled by “Israel.” The reality is that the U.S. and “Israel” control each other, with the underlying source of Zionism’s policy dominance being monopoly capitalist power. When our thinking and actions are informed by the liberation struggle that’s taking place, we recognize that the fight against Zionism is truly a fight against capital.
The task of defeating capital entails defeating the “Israel” lobby, and the influence networks of other imperial proxy states like Ukraine; but this battle is foremost about striking against the center of global capital, which is the USA’s monopolist dictatorship. There are plenty of tactics that our enemies use to try divert us from the necessary tasks; there’s the Zionist pearl-clutching about “antisemitism,” there’s the ultra-leftist hostility towards the people, there’s the JQ effort to frame Zionism as a conspiracy against “white” people. But the genocide’s targets have provided us all with the correct path forward, and they will gain many more allies.
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