“We hate Obama, too” said one comrade to me, a student and leftist active in a left-wing party in Palestine. Israeli massacres of civilians in Gaza, which killed over 1,300 men, women and children, recently have come to a temporary halt.  But, in the West Bank and Gaza, dissatisfaction is boiling over with the new U.S. imperialist president Obama and his puppet, Mahmoud Abbas of the ruling Palestinian Authority (PA) party, Fatah.

Thousands of working-class Palestinians have demonstrated in the West Bank in solidarity with Gaza, fed up with the collaborationist, U.S.-supplied-and-trained PA leaders that have done nothing while civilians in Gaza are massacred. Workers are facing detainment and torture at the hands of these outsourced-Israeli-occupation forces, their supposed “representatives.” These attacks are aimed at trying to smash dissidents and grassroots resistance to the occupation and Israeli fascism. The racist Israeli ruling class has detained over 750 Arab-Israeli citizens participating in anti-occupation demonstrations side-by-side with Jewish workers.  These leaders fear working-class, Arab-Jewish solidarity more than anything!

PA leaders like prime minister Salam Fayyad, an ex-IMF executive, have close ties to international capitalists and support the World Bank, the European Union, and rich Arab tycoons’ capital investment in the West Bank, which will only lead to more worker exploitation, unemployment, and police repression. They are pushing for a “two-state” solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict, but this would continue to be a capitalist state, no friend of the working class.

These corrupt capitalist leaders are appearing more and more despicable to the working class in Palestine. Now Hamas is gaining popularity throughout the Arab and Muslim world, even among some leftists, after the recent Gaza attacks. But the illusion that Hamas is the only alternative and the only real resistance to Israeli violence and oppression needs to be shown for what it really is: an enemy of the working class. Religious fundamentalism does not offer the working class liberation, and Hamas’ charity programs do nothing to attack the core of exploitation and imperialism — capitalism.

Palestine has a long tradition of leftist activism, but after years of repression and demonizing propaganda by ruling-class stooges on both the Israeli and Palestinian side, the left has been weakened. Now more than ever, nationalism and alliances between the left-wing parties and the pro-capitalist ruling agents (Fatah) are commonplace. As communists, we must struggle to build the left and show that Hamas is not the only alternative to PA capitalist-class corruption, and that nationalism is only a dead end for workers. Communist revolution is the only way to bring about long-term victories and justice for working families in Palestine, the exploited Israeli working class, and all workers of the world.

The struggle against Israeli fascism, imperialism, and capitalism must move beyond national boundaries and nationalist solutions.  International unity between Palestinian and Israeli workers is vital to this struggle. PLP must push communist politics against nationalism, and struggle with our comrades on the Palestinian left as well as the Israeli left to see nationalism as the worker’s enemy. Working people have no nation! Fight the occupation and exploitation!

Red in Palestine