War is the midwife of social change goes the cliché, butchering what Marx said. Russia after World War I, China after World War II. 

The war in Gaza has triggered something worldwide. Where it goes remains to be seen, but there have been more people in the streets for Palestine than for any cause, at least since the Vietnam War, if even then. My Facebook feed is full of all kinds of people supporting Palestine and attacking the Zionists. I haven’t yet seen much of a class analysis, so let me venture there.

The world has been in class warfare, sometimes hot, sometimes cold, ever since the working class – owning class rivalry ascended to dominating the world economy – capitalism in other words. 

We have been surging through “the highest stage of capitalism” as Lenin called Imperialism. Worth a re-read. 

Israel was set up in 1948 by US Imperialism (and its junior partner, UK) with the threefold purpose of (1) appearing to offer some form of reparations to the Jewish people for the Holocaust; (2) creating an imperial outpost to protect the vast oil reserves of the Middle East; (3) maintaining a bulwark against the nascent communist movement in the region. 

Make no mistake: this is Biden’s war. He and his oligarchic allies in the US are paying for it. Netanyahu and the IDF are simply the latest surrogates for US imperialism. The differences between Biden and Bibi are tactical, a dispute over how many Palestinians they can kill before they incite a worldwide uprising. 

That’s the significance of all those people in the streets. The class war against US Imperialism and capitalism is increasingly becoming a war between the capitalist West and the struggling Global South. 

Personally, I think the persistent online identification Israel with Nazism is an antisemitic trope that interferes with efforts of the movement to ally with the Israeli peace movement, as suppressed as it is. A better comparison is the settler colonialism of the United States in its own genocidal war against Native peoples which dominated the 19^th century. 

I think it makes sense to think of the Palestine freedom movement as a national liberation struggle, analogous to those in Vietnam, Algeria, Guatemala, Chile, and many other countries in the sixties and seventies, supported by the USSR, but representing a national coalition between the working classes and local capitalists. 

Unfortunately, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, there is currently no mechanism for developing the international unity to challenge US imperialism. There’s no comintern or network of communist parties to coordinate such unity. It is possible that China will play this role eventually. It’s interesting that Biden is suddenly playing nice with China in the midst of the Gaza crisis. Is China’s mixed economy too bound up with the US to lead the anti-imperialist movement? We shall see. [READ MORE, FOLLOW, SUBSCRIBE AT https://henryhitz.com/worldwide-support-for-palestine/]