Palestinian and Israeli unity: https://www.facebook.com/reel/223627420611350/

Just to be clear, I am 100% in favor of a ceasefire, a free Palestine, and against Zionist genocide.

I was weaned on antisemitism, drank it in with my mother’s milk. My uncle used to “joke,” “Hitler was half right. He should have killed the other half.” My mother scoffed, but didn’t argue with him. I think most US and European gentiles have been inculcated with antisemitism almost as much as with anti-Black racism. And, as with racism, white gentiles need to own our prejudices which persist despite our arduous efforts to contradict them and stand for social justice. 

Saying that, the problem with the comparison of Zionism with Nazism isn’t so much that it’s antisemitic. It’s unscientific. If we’re going to defeat the genocidal international capitalist class, we need a deeper understanding of the dynamics in play. 

Nazism and its Final Solution is qualitatively different even from other forms of fascism. The settler colonialism form of genocide such as perpetrated against Native peoples in North America, which Zionism most accurately resembles (if accelerated), has a transparent economic purpose: land and the wealth it produces. The same is true of the enslavement of Africans: its fundamental purpose was economic. Think of the talent lost to Germany in the Holocaust in a period of critical labor shortage. The horrific aspect of the Holocaust was that it was fundamentally irrational and self-destructive from an economic perspective. True, the assets of Jews were confiscated and contributed to the war effort, but this was hardly the purpose. The purpose of the Holocaust was to foster the starkest terror imaginable among the whole population, to scare the living shit out of them so that they would do anything for the Reich. It was Aryan/white supremacy taken to its most extreme illogical conclusion. 

This understanding is important because in order to free Palestine, the working classes of both Palestine and Israel will have to unite. This doesn’t mean we have to compromise with the racism that has infected many if not most Israelis. It’s important as gentiles that we imagine what it would be like if we were a member of a people who were murderously persecuted for at least 2000 years, culminating in the aforesaid Final Solution. To win over the Israelis who are for ceasefire and for peace, we need to avoid triggering their intense PTSD from the Holocaust trauma. It was a setup: Europe and the US offered the Jews Palestine as reparations for the Holocaust, an opportunity to build their own national capitalism by the vicious “primitive accumulation” as practiced by the US and Europe in their own colonial projects. Indeed, the US in particular is using the trauma of the Holocaust to create a bulwark against anti-capitalist movements developing in the Middle East.  

Note that this isn’t a moral judgement. I’m not saying the Holocaust was worse than the catastrophes of slavery, Native American genocide, Hiroshima or King Leopold in the Congo. Capitalism has been genocidal from its very dawn. Nazism is just different, a purer form of hate, transcending reality. Stealing is easy to understand. “Scientific,” systematic extermination not so easy. 

A scientific understanding of Israel would see it as an outpost of US Imperialism, the entity which calls most of the shots in the geopolitical world of today, with its 800 (!) bases outside the US, compared to China’s one. You read that right, one. (in Djibouti, East Africa). It’s not that complicated: the most influential segment of the US and therefore world ruling class, is the fossil fuel industry, still headed by Standard Oil, JP Morgan Chase, and the vast Rockefeller-founded network. The role of oil and natural gas are no secret in the Middle East, including Gaza (whose resources Israel and Standard Oil are stealing as we speak). 

Thanks in part to social media [is the internet the “rope” that the capitalists will sell us to hang them with? (Lenin)], we have seen unprecedented global unity in support of Palestine. Though viciously suppressed, the movement against the genocide in Israel itself is growing rapidly and threatening the Netanyahu fascist coalition. We are witnessing a global working class anti-imperialist movement that one hopes in short order will provide an alternative to global capitalist genocide. [FOLLOW AND SUBSCRIBE https://henryhitz.com]