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The period since Hamas’s disastrous “Al Aqsa Flood” operation on Oct. 7, 2023, has seen a sea change in Mideast politics every bit as profound as the transformation that followed Israel’s victory in the Six Day War in June 1967.
That event triggered a powerful chain reaction. For one thing, it marked the end of secular Arab nationalism, a movement that began in the early 20th century and reached its apogee with Gamal Abdel Nasser’s seizure of power in Egypt in 1952, the Algerian war of independence in 1954-62, and the Baathist takeover in Syria in 1963. But Israel’s military triumph four years later sent the movement into a tailspin. Nasser died a broken man in 1970, and while Syria and Egypt tried to regain momentum by launching the Yom Kippur war a year after that, the effort failed and both countries slipped deeper and deeper into poverty, decay, and dictatorship as a result.
But that was just the start. The nationalist collapse opened the door to a major Islamist offensive. The 1973 Arab oil embargo sent energy prices rocketing by 300 percent, putting billions in the hands of Islamist oil regimes in the Persian Gulf. After crushing a fundamentalist takeover of Mecca’s Grand Mosque with the help of French commandoes in 1979, Saudi Arabia then set about using its vast oil profits to fund Muslim causes in an attempt to shore up its religious credentials. Wahhabism, the kingdom’s austere brand of Sunni Islam, promptly spread from the banlieues of Paris to the slums of Jakarta. Fundamentalists also took over Egyptian universities and launched a major uprising in Syria in 1980. A fundamentalist assassination attempt against Syrian president Hafez al-Assad narrowly failed in the same year, but a similar attempt against Anwar Sadat succeeded in 1981. Operation Cyclone, the CIA’s $7.4-billion program to arm the Afghan mujahideen, sent the Islamist tide rising even more. Al Qaeda, formed by veterans of the anti-Soviet holy war in 1988, initiated the modern terrorist movement by bombing US embassies in Nairobi and Dar as Salaam in 1998, the USS Cole in 2000, and the World Trade Center and Pentagon in 2001.
The rising tide of violence seemed unstoppable. But Oct. 7 marked the bursting of the bubble. The operation took what was weak, reactionary, and bigoted about the movement and rolled them all into one.
If, for example, Hamas didn’t know that Israel would respond with overwhelming violence to the slaughter of 1,200 of its citizens and the kidnapping of 250 others, then it was merely incompetent, albeit on a massive scale.
But it did know – and didn’t care. Perverse as it may seem, mass martyrdom was the desired outcome. Hamas wanted Gazans to die in order to ignite a general holy war that would have God on its side and would therefore be victorious. After all, it is a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, founded in Egypt in 1928, whose beliefs are summed up in the slogan: “Allah is our objective, the prophet is our leader, the Qur’an is our constitution, jihad is our way, dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.” Martyrdom is thus a virtue. In 2014, Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh told an outdoor rally in Gaza: “We are a people who value death, just like our enemies value life.”[1] A Hamas leader named Ghazi Hamad declared in a Beirut TV interview a few weeks after the Oct. 7 raid: “We are called a nation of martyrs, and we are proud to sacrifice martyrs.”[2] A third leader named Sami Abu Zuhri went even farther in a TV interview in Libya just a few months ago:
A house
that was destroyed will be rebuilt, and ... the wombs of our women will give
birth to many times over the number of martyrs.
Did you know that the number of newborn babies in Gaza equals the number
of martyrs who were killed in this war?
At least 50,000 babies were born in Gaza during the war. ... So what is happening in Gaza is not about a
hundred destroyed houses or a thousand martyrs. ... We will rebuild the houses and will produce
dozens more (babies) for each martyr.
They are the price we need to pay.[3]
When a Russian journalist asked yet another Hamas leader why
the group didn’t let civilians use its tunnel network as bomb shelters, the
official replied that tunnels are needed by fighters and that, since 75 percent
of Gazans are officially classified as refugees, “it is the responsibility of the United Nations to protect them.”[4]
What kind of resistance organization takes no responsibility for the fate of its own people? What kind says that 50,000 lives don’t matter? The Oct. 7 debacle led to more. Once Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shi’ite militia, allowed itself to be drawn into the fray, its fate was sealed. Israel’s Sept. 17, 2024, pager attack neatly decapitated the organization, killing twelve and wounding more than 2,750, while its follow-up invasion of southern Lebanon two weeks later would kill 2,762 more. Hezbollah was kaput.
Then there was Iran, the control center of the
so-called Axis of Resistance, whose
turn came on June 13. This is when
Israel launched a surprise attack on key military and nuclear facilities. The Islamic republic fired off more than 550
ballistic missiles and a thousand drones in response. But the fallacy of its near-total reliance on
missile forces became apparent when Israel used its control of the skies to
steadily degrade the Iranian delivery system.
Within four days, Israel claimed to have destroyed a third of Iran’s
surface-to-surface missile launchers.[5] Iranian casualties ended up outnumbering
Israeli casualties by more than 20 to one.
Trump’s attack on June 22 was the coup de grâce. From a technical standpoint, the feat was undeniably impressive. After flying 12 hours from Missouri, with three re-fuelings mid-flight, six high-altitude B-2 bombers dropped twelve 30,000-pound bunker-buster bombs, one after the other, on Iran’s Fordow nuclear enrichment site, zeroing in on ventilation shafts with pinpoint accuracy to penetrate deep into the mountainside. With F-22 and F-35 stealth fighters providing cover against Iranian anti-air defenses – which were nonexistent by the way – a seventh B-2 dropped two bunker busters on a nuclear facility at Natanz while a nuclear submarine rained down 30 Tomahawk missiles on Natanz and on another such facility at Isfahan some 75 miles to the north.
Despite controversy over how much damage the raid caused, Seymour Hersh was most likely on target when, quoting one of his stable of anonymous intelligence sources, he reported that the operation had fully accomplished its main objective, which “was to prevent the Iranians from building a nuclear weapon in the near term – a year or so – with the hope they would not try again.”[6]
Iran’s token attack the next day on America’s Al-Udeid air base in neighboring Qatar underscored the magnitude of its defeat. Before launching 14 ballistic missiles, it was careful to give the kingdom advance notice so that US-Qatari forces would have plenty of time to shoot them down. Trump’s seemingly magnanimous response that the Iranians had “gotten it all out of their ‘system’ and there will, hopefully, be no further HATE” drove the point home. After a meaningless show of bravado, it was now totally at the mercy of the US.
Surveying the wreckage
The result is a tectonic shift fully comparable to that of 1967. Islamism was sent reeling just as secular Arab nationalism was 58 years earlier. The Shi’ite-dominated Axis of Resistance is effectively defunct while the Sunni-sectarian Al Qaeda-lite regime that Ahmed Hussein al-Sharaa has installed in Syria is so desperate to avoid a confrontation with Israel that it remained silent when Israeli warplanes systematically bombed Syrian arms stockpiles a few days after it took over in late January. This is not to say that Islamism is dead and buried. To the contrary, it may drag itself to its feet one last time just as secular Arab nationalism did in 1973.
But its downward trajectory is clear. It is a spent force. When Hamas announced in 1988 that “[t]here is no solution for the Palestinian question except through jihad,” the words resonated widely. It was a call for religious forces to do what secular forces had failed to do decades earlier. With the rise of Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and ISIS, the strategy did not seem implausible.
But
now it does. In a recent series of text exchanges with a BBC
reporter, an unnamed senior Hamas security official painted a harrowing picture
of organizational breakdown. Hamas has
lost 80 percent of its control over Gaza, he
said, its command-and-control
system has collapsed under the impact of
Israeli bombs, and armed clans were now filling the void:
Let’s be realistic here. There’s barely anything left of the security
structure. Most of the leadership, about
95 percent, are now dead... Israel has
the upper hand, the world is silent, the Arab regimes are silent, criminal
gangs are everywhere, society is collapsing.
People looted the most powerful Hamas security apparatus (Ansar), the complex which Hamas used to rule Gaza. They looted everything, the offices, mattresses, even zinc panels, and no-one intervened. No police, no security.
Armed gangs are “everywhere,” the official said:
They could stop you, kill you, no one would intervene. Anyone who tried to act on their own, like organizing resistance against thieves, was bombed by Israel within half an hour. ... For 17 years, Hamas made enemies everywhere. If someone like [armed clan leader] Abu Shabab can rally those forces, that could be the beginning of the end for us.[7]
It’s a portrait of a regime at a complete
and total dead-end. Meanwhile, Israeli
defense minister Israel Katz is floating a plan to confine Palestinians in a
small area in the south so it can deal freely with the remnants of Hamas in the
rest of Gaza. If implemented, the scheme
will result in concentration camp-like conditions for more than two million
people as they are searched, surveilled, forced to wait on line for food and
water, and otherwise humiliated, harassed, and brutalized at every turn. If the Katz plan goes through, can mass
expulsion be far behind?
The Role
of Zionism
The results are every bit as bad as the Nakba in
1948. In fact, they are worse -- Nakba
squared. Critics charge that Israel used
Al Aqsa flood as a pretext to carry out long-standing plans for mass expulsion,
but there is no evidence that is the case.[8] Israel, for example, did not seem dissatisfied
with the situation prior to Oct. 7. With
the supposed “moderates” of Qatar subsidizing Hamas by delivering suitcases of
cash, the situation seemed under control.
Indeed, Netanyahu was confident enough by March 2023 to increase the
number of Gazans allowed to work in Israel from 12,000 to 20,000. Simultaneously, the UN reported that Gaza
exports via Israeli-controlled crossings were reaching their highest level
since 2007. So the regime gave every
indication of allowing the status quo to continue. There is no reason to think that it had initially
any intention of upsetting the apple cart by embarking on a radical program of
ethnic cleansing.[9] But now it is plainly on the agenda as conditions deteriorate to
horrendous levels.
If Zionists have been successful in the course of their hundred years’ war with the Palestinians, it’s because they have been able to marshal their vastly superior military infrastructure, aided at critical junctures by American and European imperialism. Raging on and on about Zionist perfidy, aggression, and so forth does not bring us any closer to an objective and scientific evaluation of Zionism as a political phenomenon.
Any such effort must begin with Theodor Herzl, the Austrian-Jewish journalist whose 1896 pamphlet, Der Judenstaat, marked the start of the modern Zionist movement. Herzl was a typical conservative authoritarian of the day, one who opposed universal suffrage, distrusted parliamentary democracy, and favored “an aristocratic republic” in Palestine, as he put it in his pamphlet, that would firmly “suppress” dissent from below. Rather than an opponent of anti-Semitism, he saw the movement as a not-unwelcome response to a growing Jewish presence that he regarded as untenable. “I do not consider the anti-Semitic movement entirely harmful,” he wrote. “It will break the arrogance of the ostentatious rich, the unscrupulousness and cynicism of Jewish financial wire-pullers, and contribute much to the education of the Jews.” In 1892, he described European Jews as “a people debased through oppression, emasculated, distracted by money, tamed in numerous corrals.” Hence, he believed that anti-Semitism should not be opposed, but used as an instrument to pry Jews loose from western society and transfer them to Palestine. “Honest anti-Semites, whilst preserving their independence, will combine with our officials in controlling the transfer of our estates,” Der Judenstaat states.[10]
Anti-Semites and Zionists thus shared a common goal, which was to remove Jews from a European continent in which they had lived for 2,000 years. Not only would Jews liberate themselves by moving to Palestine, Herzl confided in his diary, but they would be liberating Christians too, “liberating them from us.”[11] In the wake of the 1903 Kishinev pogrom, which led to worldwide condemnation of the Russian imperial government for permitting such atrocities, Herzl saw no problem in seeking out the support of czarist anti-Semites such as prime minister Sergei Witte or Vyacheslav von Plehve, the minister of the interior accused of fomenting the massacre. The first told him that “if it is possible to drown the six or seven million Jews in the Black Sea, I have absolutely no objection to it,” but conceded that forced emigration would be a better solution. The second agreed that emigration was preferable. As Herzl excitedly told a Russian-Jewish radical named Chaim Zhitlovsky:
‘I have just come from von Plehve. I have an absolutely binding promise from him that he will procure a charter for Palestine for us in fifteen years at the outside. There is one condition, however: revolutionaries must stop their struggle against the Russian government. If at the end of fifteen years von Plehve has not obtained the charter, [the revolutionaries] will then be free to do whatever they deem necessary.’[12]
 |
| Theodore Herzl |
This became clear in the 1920s when, under the rubric of the “conquest of labor,” Zionist “labor organizers” set about doing to the Palestinians what czarists had done to the Jews. They stood guard at Jewish-owned orchards to see to it that no Arabs were hired. They organized boycotts of Arab shops, sabotaged Arab-sold fruit and vegetables by dousing them with kerosene, and even attacked Jewish women who dared purchase Arab farm goods. British authorities described such tactics as a campaign of intimidation whose aim was to enforce a Jews-only hiring policy. Zionists did not disagree. In 1929, the Jewish Agency declared that its goal was to “promote agricultural colonization based on Jewish labor,” while the Jewish National Fund, which purchased land for use by Jewish farmers, drew up a model contract stipulating that “[t]he lessee undertakes to execute all works connected with the cultivation of the holding only with Jewish labor.”[13] Wrote Herzl:
The private lands in the territories granted us we must gradually take out of the hands of the owners. The poorer amongst the population we try to transfer quietly outside our borders by providing them with work in the transit countries, but in our country we deny them all work.[14]
The strategy alarmed not only Arab workers but Jewish socialists who noted that Zionist boycotts perfectly mirrored anti-Jewish boycotts that rightwing nationalists were enforcing in Poland. The outcry in The Jewish Daily Forward in New York was fierce. An immigrant socialist named Chaim Spivak wrote in 1926 that the anti-Arab boycott “sends shudders through the Jewish workers in the Diaspora countries because the gentiles could try out this principle against the Jewish workers.” Demanded a writer named Ben-Zion Hoffman: “How do we react when the reactionary chauvinists in Poland fight for their ‘conquest of labor,’ meaning prevention of Jews working in Polish industrial and commercial enterprises? How do we respond to the ‘conquest of labor’ of the Romanians?”[15]
But Zionists were undeterred. “We cannot start the Jewish state … with half the population being Arab,” Avraham Ussishkin, the Labor Zionist in charge of the Jewish National Fund, observed in 1938. Said a JNF official named Yosef Weitz: “There is no way but to transfer the Arabs from here to the neighboring countries, to transfer all of them, save perhaps for [the mainly Arab Christian cities of] Bethlehem, Nazareth, and old Jerusalem. Not one village must be left, not one tribe.”[16] In 1938, members of Menachem Begin’s rightwing Irgun tossed a bomb into a crowded Arab market in Haifa, killing nine men, six women, and three children. Just as Nazis sought a Judenrein Germany, Zionists sought an Arab-free Palestine.
But the symmetrical nature of the process should not be ignored. May Day 1921, for example, saw a remarkable incident when a few hundred members of a small pro-Bolshevik group calling itself the Hebrew Socialist Workers Party took to the streets of Tel Aviv with Yiddish-language banners proclaiming, “Long live the Communist International” and “Long live the free women of the Communist society.” They passed out leaflets declaring in Hebrew and Yiddish, “Long live the international solidarity of the Jewish and Arab proletariat” along with Arabic-language leaflets stating: “Down with the British and French bayonets! Down with the Arab and foreign capitalists! Long live Soviet Palestine.” A shoving match ensued with Labor Zionists. But when Arabs from a nearby neighborhood burst on the scene, the conflict took a different turn. Instead of attacking one or the other faction, they attacked both. As a British enquiry would later put it:
Practically the whole of the non-Jewish population was united in hostility to the Jews. During the riots all discrimination on the part of the Arabs between different categories of Jews was obliterated. Old establish colonists and newly arrived immigrants, Chalukah [Orthodox] Jews and Bolshevik Jews, Algerian Jews and Russian Jews, became merged in a single identity....[17]
The incident led to a week of intercommunal fighting in which 47 Jews and 48 Arabs were killed and more than 200 wounded. But what stands out about the clash was the xenophobic quality as a traditional society closed ranks against troublesome outsiders. This is hardly unprecedented; indeed, history is full of such incidents. A particularly striking example occurred in 1799 when Napoleon’s short-lived “Parthenopean Republic” collapsed in Naples. The republic was led by high-minded reformers wishing to bestow “the fine ideals of political liberty, freedom of thought, and strict equality before the law,” to quote one historian. But local people were having none of it. After all, the reformers were educated, well-to-do, and, in some cases, absentee landowners driving landless agricultural workers deeper and deeper into destitution. Led by priests, desperate peasants and slum-dwellers known as lazzaroni therefore “descended with fury on cities where the republicans had come into power.”[18]
All Palestinians knew in 1921 was that Jews were buying up properties and throwing them off the land. Led by the mullahs, they likewise descended on them with fury. Rashid Rida (1865-1935), a Lebanese-born Islamic scholar who was a forerunner of the Muslim Brotherhood, was originally sympathetic to Jewish causes. But after renewed Jewish-Arab fighting in 1929, he published a two-part article that “combin[ed] assertions that reflected the Muslim tradition that was the most hostile to Jews ... with shameless borrowings from the most hackneyed commonplaces of the European anti-Semitism of the day,” according to the historian Gilbert Achcar. A long-time stalwart of Ernest Mandel’s United Secretariat, Achcar notes that, by the 1930s, Rida was increasingly sympathetic to Nazism while vituperating against both Soviet Communism and the secular reformism of Turkish leader Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.[19]
 |
| Rashid Rida |
Secular nationalists closed ranks too. In 1939-40, three young Arab intellectuals formed a political club in Damascus that became the nucleus of the postwar Syrian Ba’ath Party. The three – Zaki Arsuzi, Sami al-Jundi, and the Ba’athist theorist Michel ‘Aflaq – engaged in lengthy discussions of “democracy, Communism and Nazism, beginning with Descartes and ending with H.S. Chamberlain,” the latter being an Anglo-German anti-Semite who was a key figure in the formulation of Nazi racial policy. “Whoever has lived during this period in Damascus will appreciate the inclination of the Arab people to Nazism,” al-Jundi recalled, “for Nazism was the power which could serve as its champion, and he who is defeated will by nature love the victor.” He went on:
We were racialists, admiring Nazism, reading its books and the sources of its thought, particularly Nietzsche’s Thus spake Zarathustra, Fichte’s Addresses to the German Nation, and HS Chamberlain’s Foundations of the Nineteenth Century which revolves on the race. We were the first to think of translating Mein Kampf.[20]
 |
| Sami al-Jundi |
The class-conscious workers fight hard against every kind of nationalism, both the crude, violent, Black-Hundred nationalism, and that most refined nationalism which preaches the equality of nations together with ... the splitting up of the workers’ cause, the workers’ organizations and the working-class movement according to nationality.
In his “Draft Theses on National and Colonial Questions” in June 1920, he stressed “the need for a struggle against the clergy and other influential reactionary and medieval elements in backward countries” and “the need to combat Pan-Islamism and similar trends, which strive to combine the liberation movement against European and American imperialism with an attempt to strengthen the positions of the khans, landowners, mullahs, etc.”[21]
Or as Trotsky said of the failed Chinese revolution of 1927:
The Russian bourgeoisie was the bourgeoisie of an imperialist oppressor state; the Chinese bourgeoisie, a bourgeoisie of an oppressed colonial country. The overthrow of feudal Czarism was a progressive task in old Russia. The overthrow of the imperialist yoke is a progressive historical task in China. However, the conduct of the Chinese bourgeoisie in relation to imperialism, the proletariat, and the peasantry, was not more revolutionary than the attitude of the Russian bourgeoisie towards Czarism and the revolutionary classes in Russia, but, if anything, viler and more reactionary.[22]
If the Chinese bourgeoisie of the 1920s was even “viler and more
reactionary” than the Russian, then the subsequent Mideast bourgeoisie was even
“viler and more reactionary” than the Chinese.
Nationalists and fundamentalists joined in a common front against
Zionism that mirrored Zionism’s most intolerant and conservative qualities.
Oil
Observed the Palestinian historian Walid Khalidi:
Behind the seemingly labyrinthine complexities of the so-called Arab-Israeli conflict and the baffling maze of claims and counter-claims there lies a continuous and continuing dual process. On the one hand, Zionist determination to implement, consolidate, and expand [Herzl’s] Basel ‘vision,’ irrespective of the Arab character and patrimony in Palestine and its hinterland; on the other, a corresponding development of Arab resistance to Zionist encroachment and self-fulfillment at Arab expense. This is the essence of the Palestine tragedy. All else is derivative.[23]
This is eloquent but wrong. The Israeli-Arab conflict cannot be seen in narrow national terms, but as an outgrowth of an all-consuming capitalist crisis that is thoroughly international in scope. If the “scramble for Africa” dates from the 1880s, then the “scramble for the Middle East” only started in a serious way in the 1910s and ’20s when oil began to supplant coal as the motor force of industrial capitalism. With the formation of the Anglo-Persian Oil Co. in 1909, Britain took increasing control of Iraq and Iran while Standard Oil of California and Texaco – later to join forces as the Arabian American Oil Co. or Aramco – created the Saudi oil industry from scratch in the 1930s and ’40s. The results were transformative, both politically and economically. Formerly a backwater, Saudi Arabia emerged as a major political player, clearing the way for Islamism’s subsequent rise. Fundamentalism further exploded in the crucial year of 1979 when three events occurred: the overthrow of the shah in January, the seizure of the Grand Mosque in Mecca in November, and a growing revolt in Afghanistan that prompted the Soviet Union to intervene militarily in late December. Jihad emerged as an explosive new force in response to the first, while the Saudis, desperate to bolster their religious standing, responded to the second by pouring billions into Islamic causes throughout the world. The third provided Riyadh with a perfect arena in which to display its largesse. In partnership with the US, it began channeling billions to Muslim mujahideen engaged in a holy war with Soviet forces.
Militant Islam had arrived. Needless to say, the new movement did nothing to foster peace, progress, and prosperity. Quite the opposite: it helped plunge the region into war and economic decline.
Like all religions, Islam has much to answer for. But it was not the main driving force. Rather, it was oil, imperialism, and, in particular, an economic phenomenon known as the “resource curse” whose empirical validity has been established beyond question.
The curse works by fostering a rentier economy in which the goal is not to work or invest, but to feed off profits flowing from energy extraction. As presidents, generals, and ministers scramble for a share, corruption multiplies, authoritarianism rises, and the economy grows less diversified and hence more vulnerable to abrupt changes in international markets. Paradoxically, the effect is to undermine growth rather than raise it. Moreover, once dictators invest in tanks, advanced jet fighters, and other military toys, the temptation grows overwhelming to use them against enemies threatening their glory. In the Persian Gulf region, home of roughly two-thirds of the world’s oil reserves and a third of its natural gas reserves, the result has been 40-plus years of fanaticism and warfare amid deepening imperial intervention. In January 1980, Jimmy Carter – in a statement written by Zbigniew Brzezinski, his national security adviser – formulated what has come to be known as the Carter Doctrine:
Let our position be absolutely clear. An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.
The results were soon apparent. Within months, the Iran-Iraq war erupted, an eight-year conflict that would claim perhaps a million lives and one in which the US would provide Iraq with “extensive and wide-ranging” military support.[24] The Gulf War followed in 1990-91 in response to Saddam Hussein’s takeover of the Kuwaiti oil fields, Al Qaeda embarked on its reign of terror in 1998, while the US invaded Iraq in March 2003. With Saudi-funded Al Qaeda no less hostile to Shi’ite “apostates” as to the United States, sectarian violence exploded. With the entire region in turmoil, millions of refugees struggled to make their way to the west, destabilizing bourgeois politics all the more.
This was not the fault of the Mideast masses but of US imperialism and the oil-rich local despots it supports. As for the US-Israeli alliance, the consequence was to strengthen it all the more. Hard as it may be to believe, the US initially tried to keep its distance from the Jewish state. The Truman administration strove for neutrality vis-à-vis the Arab-Israeli conflict, Eisenhower blocked the British, French, and Israeli takeover of the Suez Canal, while the State Department was known for its coolness to Tel Aviv. As late as 1972, the Spartacist League could observe:
The vocality and visibility of the American Zionist lobby should not blind one to the fact that the American ruling class is not composed of Jewish nationalists. In fact, the hysterical desperation of American Zionists arises from an awareness that the pro-Israeli policies of the US government are contingent, not fundamental. Even more so than their American supporters, [Golda] Meir and [Moshe] Dayan understand the limited and brittle nature of US imperialism’s commitment to Israeli nationalism.[25]
This is no longer the case. The more the US has thrown itself into the Mideast vortex, the deeper and more extensive the Zionist alliance has grown. What began as a military partnership is now a joint ideological crusade. Indeed, the American ruling class is now chockful of Jewish nationalists who in some cases are more Zionist than the Zionists. This is the significance of Trump’s “Riviera” plan for Gaza: he did not hesitate to call for ethnic cleansing at a time when even Netanyahu was hesitant. The result was to outflank the Netanyahu government on the right, no small achievement in itself.
As a result, the US-Israeli alliance now dominates from the Mediterranean to the Arabian Sea. Except for the Houthis, resistance has been eliminated. After 45 years, the Carter-Brzezinski call to transform the Persian Gulf into an American lake has been achieved in spades. US imperialism controls an all-important energy chokepoint that it could conceivably use against China and other countries in the Far East.
But oil is not just at the center of an
imperial crisis, but of an environmental crisis threatening all humanity. This, of course, is the climate crisis in
which CO2 emissions from rampant fossil-fuel use play the leading
role. The climate crisis is not the
result of greed, profligacy, or other moral failings that bourgeois
environmentalists like to harp on.
Rather, it is the result of technological stagnation that prevents
capitalism from advancing to new forms of energy production. Whether the solution is hydro, wind, solar,
or nuclear, the point is that capitalism is mired in old forms of energy
production whose costs in terms of military expenditures, mass migration, and
rising temperatures more than outweigh their economic benefits. The more capitalism struggles to maintain
itself, the more it becomes mired in war, waste, social decay, and
environmental collapse.
Outlook and
prospects
The implications for humanity are profound, especially in the Mideast, an area of growing social backwardness. Economically, it is the most unequal region in the world. Where the top ten percent monopolizes 36 percent of income in Europe, for instance, the same layer monopolizes 57 percent in MENA – the Middle East and North Africa – which is to say nearly 60 percent more. Middle-income MENA countries have lagged middle-income nations in general since 2000 in terms of economic growth. The region also has the world’s lowest rate of female participation in the workforce – 18 percent versus a global average of 49.[26]
Outside of the gulf oil monarchies, economic growth is stagnant at best according to World Bank data. Since 2014, per-capita GDP has risen 16 percent in Morocco and 6.5 percent in Egypt. But it has fallen 7.6 percent in Algeria over the same period and 16 percent in Iran thanks to US sanctions. In other countries, the situation is even worse. Since the 2019 economic crisis, per-capita GDP in Lebanon has fallen 61 percent. In Libya, it has fallen 58 percent since the overthrow of Gaddafi in 2012. In Yemen, it is down 68 percent since the US-backed Saudi air war began in April 2015, while, in Syria, it is down 71 percent since the US and Saudi Arabia launched a proxy war in 2011 in order to topple the Assad dynasty.
The effects are devastating. With Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia desperate to enter into business deals with the Trump family, the economic gap between the gulf elite and the masses can only climb. The upshot will be more autocracy, more social decay, more despondency, and more refugees.
And then there is Palestine. The West Bank is bad enough due to the fallout from Oct. 7. More than 300,000 jobs have been lost while unemployment has zoomed from 12.9 to 32 percent. Eighty percent of businesses in Jerusalem’s Old City have either partially or completely ceased operations. Some 930 West Bank Palestinians have been killed by Israeli troops or settlers since the Oct. 7 attack according to the UN.[27]
But Gaza is far worse. The official Palestinian death toll now tops 59,000, although the Lancet argues that indirect deaths could bring the total to 186,000 or more, which is to say 7.9 percent of the population.[28] Ninety percent of the population has meanwhile been displaced, some as many as ten times each. Some 851 people have been killed and more than 5,000 injured since late May alone when Israel took control of food distribution. Meningitis and others diseases are spreading in the wake of a medical blockade that Israel imposed in early March. Starvation is mounting. The UN estimates that 43.5 percent of all buildings in Gaza have been severely damaged or destroyed.[29]
Yet just a few hours to the
north, gunmen supporters of Syria’s new “Al Qaeda-lite” government have massacred
as many as 1,500 Alawites and 1,000 Druze.
The Levant is afire with sectarian violence from one end to the other.
What is to be done?
The anti-Zionist protests that erupted in the wake of Oct. 7 shattered the pro-Israel consensus in Europe, North America, and elsewhere. The effect was especially dramatic among US Jews once known for uncritical loyalty to the Jewish state. The contradiction has long been glaring since Jews have also been known as strong supporters of civil rights. Ultimate security, they reasoned, was to be found in a society that is democratic and anti-racist; if others were treated equally, then Jews would be too. But now the community found itself forced to deal with a Jewish state whose treatment of the Palestinians is an affront to any concept of decency, equality, and fairness. The contradiction has therefore exploded. Not surprisingly, two of the most prominent protest groups were Jewish Voices for Peace and If Not Now, so called for a first-century-BCE rabbinic sage named Hillel the Elder famous for asking, “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?” At Columbia University, where the first anti-Zionist tent city went up in April 2024, a major portion of the participant were Jewish, evidence in itself that charges that the protests were anti-Semitic were a lie.
But the movement’s shortcomings are impossible to ignore. Initially, protesters did their best to screen out pro-violence elements. When a member blurted out that “Zionists don’t deserve to live” and “be grateful that I’m not just going out and murdering Zionists,” a group calling itself Columbia University Apartheid Divest issued an apology. But a few months later, it took it back. “We let you down,” the group wrote. No longer would it “pander to liberal media to make the movement for liberation palatable.” On the first anniversary of Oct. 7, it published a mock edition of the New York Times celebrating the attack as a “moral, military, and political victory.”[30] As the movement’s numbers dwindled, tactics meanwhile grew more frantic. In May 2024, a pro-Palestinian group called Within Our Lifetime targeted the Brooklyn Museum on the grounds that it is “deeply invested in and complicit” in Israel’s military actions in Gaza and vandalized the homes of members of its board of trustees. What this would do to stop the slaughter in Gaza was anybody’s guess. WOL picketed an exhibit devoted to the 378 participants at an Israeli rock festival who were among the victims on Oct. 7, dismissing the display as “Zionist propaganda” and the festival itself as “a rave next to a concentration camp.”[31] Instead of engendering support for the Palestinian cause, stunts like these were all but designed to drive it away.
Protesters thus went from acceding to Hamas tactics that would prove catastrophic for the Palestinians to actively embracing them. The results were demoralizing and left the movement wide open to Zionist attack.
But this is to be expected of a moment that is purely nationalist in terms of political perspective, one that has nothing to say about oil, the US, the role of the Persian Gulf petro-sheiks, or capitalism in general. Not unlike Theodor Herzl, it doesn’t oppose imperialism, but, rather, seeks to turn it in its favor. This is the thrust of BDS, the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement whose governing board includes representatives of Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Its aim is to pressure Harvard, Columbia, and other bourgeois institutions to withdraw investment so that Israeli proletarians, Jewish and Arab, can be thrown out of work. It is a form of upside-down Zionism in which the Jewish state is seen as uniquely evil – uniquely racist, that is, uniquely expansionist, uniquely undemocratic. But this stands reality on its head since Israel has had five parliamentary elections just since April 2019 whereas Gaza has had zero since Hamas took over in 2006.
As the Palestinian-American historian Rashid Khalidi observed in 2004:
Sadly, what the nationalist regimes have managed to produce is neither lasting national achievements nor continuing social progress nor protection of the dignity of the individual. Instead they have created a black hole on the map stretching from the Atlantic coast of North Africa to the Persian/Arab Gulf, where by and large democracy is absent and the state does as it pleases, and where power and benefits are passed down within a dominant family, oligarchy, or ethnic group.[32]
Needless to say, Islamism has done nothing to make the situation the slightest bit better. There is meanwhile no reason to see Jewish nationalism as qualitatively different from US, French, German, or, for that matter, Arab nationalism. All are guilty of enormous crimes – slavery, the eradication of the native Americans, the Holocaust, or the crushing of the hopes of millions of Middle Easterners for freedom, equality, and economic development, to name just a few. The movement’s constant harping on Israel as a “settler-colonial” state is pure revanchism, no different, fundamentally, from the French nationalist clamor for the return of Alsace-Lorraine after 1871 or the Argentine nationalist clamor for the return of the Malvinas.
Within Israel proper, which is to say within the pre-1967 borders, Israelis are no long settler-colonists, but ordinary citizens like those of any other nation-state. Approximately 80.6 percent of Israelis, Arab, Jewish, or other, are native-born, virtually the same as the United States, where the comparable figure is now 81.5. Like French, Germans, British, etc., they have nowhere else to go – Israel is their home. Zionism’s origins as an imperialist venture should therefore not be used to obscure the fact that Palestinians and Israelis are an “interpenetrated people,” to use the Spartacist phrase, competing for a single plot of land. The fates of both are mutually entwined. Freedom for one is impossible without freedom for the other.
The military destruction of Zionism is a myth. After a century of war, terrorism, massacres, and whatnot, Israel’s military position is untouched. Every attempt at military assault strengthens it. Not only is the US-Zionist alliance stronger than ever, but, elsewhere in the Middle East, the only thing that militarism has accomplished has been to place more and more power in the hands of its the most reactionary element, i.e. the oil monarchies of the Persian Gulf.
It is a
vicious cycle that must be broken. The
only force capable of doing so is revolution, not Arab or Islamic but proletarian. Such a revolution must establish women’s
rights, LGBTQ rights, and the rights of all national minorities as among its
top priorities. “We demand unconditional
equality for all nations in the state,” Lenin declared in 1913, “and the
unconditional protection of the rights of every minority” – words that are no
less relevant now than they were more than a century ago. And all, it must be emphasized, means all,
Jews no less than Palestinians, Berbers no less than Arabs, Shi’ites no less
than Sunnis, and Christians, Alawites, and Druze no less than Muslims in
general.
The Mandel legacy
In their deference to Third World nationalism, Ernest Mandel and his followers conceived of Mideast revolution in terms that were both two-stage and Arab-centric. As Mandel wrote in 1947:
The starting point of the position of the Fourth International on the Palestine problem must be the understanding of the necessity of the anti-imperialist struggle waged by the Arabs, to which it gives the objective of the constitution of the Union of the Arab countries of the Middle East ... It is the Arab masses, the workers and the poor peasants, who constitute the revolutionary force in the Middle East.
Only when the Arab revolution was complete – when foreign troops were kicked out, when an all-Mideast constituent assembly was convened, when landlords were expropriated, etc. – would the victorious revolution be in a position to begin peeling away Jewish workers from Zionism.[33]
Mandel’s United Secretariat was even more emphatic in 1974. To be sure, minority questions still loomed:
...[A]s a direct consequence of the imperialist fragmentation of the Arab region, there has been added to the Arab national question, other national problems: the problems of the non-Arabized Berber masses and the problems of the nationalities artificially included in the Arab states, as well as that of the Jewish population of the state of Israel.
But “Arab national unity is the central task of the Arab revolution,” the resolution stressed. Other groups would therefore have to accommodate themselves to the majority. Zionism would have to be destroyed since it “rests on racist foundations.” But:
Only after the achievement of this necessary historical task of the Arab revolution will it be possible to deal concretely and correctly with the question of the rights of the Jewish national minority in Palestine.[34]
Arabs make the revolution, in other words, while Berbers and Jews follow behind. The Jewish problem will be resolved only after the revolution. The poverty of this approach is obvious since it fails to recognize that minorities are anything but peripheral to the revolutionary process. Far from an afterthought, they shape it, democratize it, and broaden its horizons – as, of course, do women and sexual minorities. This is the essence of the theory of permanent revolution, in which democratic and socialist tasks are combined into one. Mandel & Co. were so in thrall to Third World nationalism that they were incapable of grasping this basic dialectical truth.
Pan-Arabism is not revolutionary. Comparisons with German or Italian unification in the 1860s are ahistorical. Today, the concept is every bit as reactionary as Pan-Africanism or whatever other “pan” one might come up with. (Pan-Asianism? Pan-Latin Americanism?) Thanks to the dramatic growth of globalization, regional differences are receding in importance. What is the Arab response to the climate crisis as opposed to that of Africa or Latin America? What is its response to inflation or the slowdown in productivity growth? The answer is that it’s no different because everywhere the problem is increasingly the same. A capitalist crisis that is more and more unified demands an international proletarian response that is more and more unified as well.
Moreover, pan-Arabism would strike terror in the heart of beleaguered Mideast minorities who equate it, not unreasonably, with chauvinism and militarism. With this in mind, it is very easy to imagine a Mideast revolution unfolding along very different lines. Instead of beginning with Arabs and then spreading outwards, it could just as easily begin with ethnically and religiously diverse populations in areas such as the Levant or the broader Fertile Crescent. These are places in which a multitude of ethnic and religious groups jostle for power and space. Relations are poisonous. But, then, they were none too good in Czarist Russia. Yet instead of seeing them solely as an impediment to revolution, Bolsheviks saw ethno-religious conflict – or, rather, the struggle to overcome it – as a central driving force of revolution.
As hopeless as things seem now, it is not
difficult to imagine Jews, Palestinians, Arabs, Alawites, and other workers
coming together in a larger revolutionary process that seeks to put
intercommunal relations on a completely different footing. Instead of Arab consolidation, the goal
should be to integrate the many different peoples of the Middle East into the
international socialist community. It’s
a goal that Zionism and political Islam equally seek to impede.
[1] Tareq Baconi, Hamas Contained: The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance (Stanford: Stanford Univ.
Press, 2018), xix.
[3] Sami Abu Zuhri, head of Hamas foreign political office,
AL-Tanasuh TV (Libya), Mar. 30, 2025, available at https://x.com/EYakoby/status/1924479825659453557.
[4] Interview with Mousa Abu Marzouk,
Oct. 27, 2023, available at https://www.memri.org/tv/hamas-official-mousa-abu-marzouk-tunnels-gaza-protect-fighters-%20not-civilians.
[5] Emanuel Fabian, “Israel will
achieve its objectives against Iran within a week or two, say IDF officials,”
Times of Israel, June 17, 2025, https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/israel-will-achieve-its-objectives-against-iran-within-a-week-or-two-say-idf-officials/; “Israeli army claims it destroyed
30% of Iran’s missile launchers,” Al Jazeera, June 1611, 2025, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/liveblog/2025/6/15/updates-death-toll-grows-as-iran-and-israel-continue-to-trade-attacks?update=3778947.
[6] Seymour Hersh, “Was it
obliteration?,” July 4, 2025, https://seymourhersh.substack.com/p/was-it-obliteration?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=1377040&post_id=167448892&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=false&r=1ci2x&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email.
[7] Rushdi Abualouf, “Hamas security
officer says group has lost control over most of Gaza,” July 6, 2025, https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4gk79xlzwjo.
[8] See for example Mouin Rabbani,
“The long history of Zionist proposals to ethnically cleanse the Gaza Strip,”
Dec. 28, 2023, https://mondoweiss.net/2023/12/the-long-history-of-zionist-proposals-to-ethnically-cleanse-the-gaza-strip/f.
[9] Aaron Boxerman, “Israel set to raise work permit quotas for Gazans to
20,000,” Mar. 26, 2022, https://www.timesofisrael.com/israel-set-to-raise-work-permit-quotas-for-gazans-to-20000/.
[10] See Theodor Herzl, The Jewish State (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover,
1988), 112, 145, and Jacques Kornberg, Theodor
Herzl: From Assimilation to Zionism (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1993),
117, 126.
[11] Ibid., 162.
[12] The Complete Diaries of Theodor Herzl (New York: The Herzl Press,
1960), vol. 4, sec. 1528-32; Sondra Miller Rubenstein, The Communist Movement in Palestine and Israel 1919-1984 (Boulder:
Westview Press, 1985), 14.
[13] John Quigley, The Case for Palestine: An International Law Perspective (Durham,
NC: Duke Univ. Press, 2005), 20-21.
[14]Haim Haneghi, Moshe Machover, and
Akiva Orr, “The Class Nature of Israeli Society,” New Left Review 65 (1971), https://newleftreview.org/issues/i65/articles/haim-haneghi-moshe-machover-akiva-orr-the-class-nature-of-israeli-society.??
[15] Yaacov N. Goldstein, Jewish Socialists in the United States: The
Cahan Debate 1925-1926 (Brighton, UK: Sussex Academic Press, 1998), 140,
177.
[16] Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Problem Revisited (Cambridge:
Cambridge Univ. Press, 2004), 50, 54.
[17] Rubenstein, op. cit., 60-62.
[18] R.R. Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and
America, 1760-1800 (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2014), 658-60.
[19] Gilbert
Achcar, The Arabs
and the Holocaust: The Arab-Israeli War of Narratives (New
York: Metropolitan Books, 2010), 111-19.
[20] Stefan Wild, “National Socialism
in the Arab Near East Between 1933 and 1939, Die Welt des Islams XXV (1985), 131.
[21] https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1914/may/10.htm and https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/jun/05.htm.
[22] Leon Trotsky, The Third International After Lenin (1928), part III: Summary and
Perspectives of the Chinese Revolution, https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1928/3rd/ti08.htm#p3-01.
[23] Avi Shlaim, Collusion Across the Jordan: King Abdullah, the Zionist Movement, and
the Partition of Palestine (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1988), 3.
[24] Rashid Khalidi, Resurrecting Empire: Western Footprints and America’s Perilous Path in
the Middle East (Boston: Beacon Press, 2004), 42.
[25] “Near East Ceasefire: More War
Ahead!” Workers Vanguard, Nov. 9, 1972, https://www.marxists.org/subject/israel-palestine/spart/more-war-ahead.pdf.
[26] World Bank, April 2025, https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/c5d0390b-3aee-44ee-93e6-b54321473da4/content.
[27] For economic data, see UN Trade
and Development, https://unctad.org/publication/report-unctad-assistance-palestinian-people-0;
For information on fatalities, see the UN Office for the Coordination of
Humanitarian Afffairs at https://www.ochaopt.org/data/casualties.
[28] Rasha Khatib, Martin McKee, and
Salim Yusuf, “Counting the dead in Gaza,” July 20, 2024, https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(24)01169-3/fulltext.
[29] See https://www.unrwa.org/resources/reports/unrwa-situation-report-180-situation-gaza-strip-and-west-bank-including-east-jerusalem
and https://unitar.org/about/news-stories/press/66percent-total-structures-gaza-strip-have-sustained-damage-unosats-analysis-reveals.
[30] Sharon Otterman, “Pro-Palestinian
Group at Columbia Now Backs ‘Armed Resistance’ by Hamas,” Oct. 9, 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/09/nyregion/columbia-pro-palestinian-group-hamas.html?searchResultPosition=4.
[31] Philip Marcelo, “Apparent Gaza
activists hurl paint at homes of Brooklyn Museum leaders, including Jewish
director,” June 12, 2024, https://apnews.com/article/gaza-vandals-nyc-brooklyn-museum-un-05e700ef49fc2632525a2cd9e1d9606f.
[32] Khalidi, op. cit., 70.
[33] Draft Theses on the Jewish
Question, International Secretariat, June 1947, https://www.workersliberty.org/story/2017-07-26/document-1-fourth-international-statement-draft-theses-jewish-question.
[34] “The Arab Revolution: Its
character, present state, and perspectives,” March 1974, https://internationalviewpoint.org/spip.php?article1608.
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