Imperialism and resistance from Gaza to Lebanon

All of us are, at the moment, opening our phones, our TV screens or looking at the internet and seeing every moment bringing fresh horrors from Gaza, from Lebanon, from Iran and throughout the Middle East. We’ve seen the immolation of patients outside Al-Aqsa hospital, horrific scenes broadcast around the world.

 

All of which makes the claims by Joe Biden and Keir Starmer in the UK that somehow this war was all about Israel needing to kill Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas, or Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, seem exceedingly hollow.

 

Those of us who have been marching and protesting on the streets in our millions, of course, never bought into this. We’ve known from the beginning that this has been a war against the Palestinian people as a whole and not simply a war against Hamas, in the same way as the war that is being carried out in Lebanon is against the Lebanese people as a whole.

 

But there is a sense in which Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was right when he said that the war being prosecuted by the Israeli state is an attempt to shift the balance of power in the Middle East in Israel’s favour. It is carrying out a political as well as a military strategy, which is not simply about subjugating the Palestinians – although that is of course part of the picture.

 

Other members of the Israeli government, particularly Bezalel Smotrich who is one of the far-right ministers in the government, are also in a certain sense right when they say that there is an existential question at stake, that there can be no co-existence between two competing national projects – a Palestinian one, versus the Jewish supremacist, racist and apartheid state that Smotrich and Netanyahu are defending and trying to expand – on the same piece of territory, historic Palestine.

 

This is one reason why any revolutionary perspective on a future without war and without violence in the region has to be based on the idea that there can only be one democratic Palestinian state at the end of that process. There is no prospect of having a two-state solution as a way out of this war.

 

When we look at what is really driving this particular phase in the conflict, a whole range of different answers are brought up. Sometimes people will argue that there’s a uniquely racist violent ideology at play in Zionism, or that it’s to do with the settler-colonial nature of Israeli society, or it’s an outgrowth to the apartheid nature of the Israeli state.

 

Although the racism in Zionism has a legacy and roots going back to the period of European colonialism, and Zionists have always seen themselves as part of a European settler-colonial project, they’re not really the driving force behind what’s going on at the moment, nor across the whole of the history of the development of the struggle for liberation of Palestine.

 

Actually, a Marxist analysis of Imperialism is central to understanding both where the war comes from and how it is the latest round of a longer-standing struggle, and also what the potential alternatives or solutions really are and what social forces both in the region and internationally can provide the firmest the basis on which to resist the Israeli state.

 

Imperialism

 

The term Imperialist is often used in everyday speech – people think of domination by strong countries of weak countries, or they might think about conquest, they might have images of the Death Star and Darth Vader in their minds, of a kind of overwhelming military force being applied to weaker forces.

 

Those are all aspects of what Imperialism is, but there is a more specific, narrow definition which sees Imperialism as a fusion of processes of economic and military competition under capitalism – in other words, that capitalist accumulation drives war and imperialism.

 

This argument was subject to debates by Marxists over a hundred years ago when they looked at the parceling of the world by the European powers. There were debates especially among people like Rosa Luxemburg, Vladimir Lenin, Bukharin, Karl Kautsky and so on at the time, trying to come to an understanding of what Imperialism meant.

 

In terms of what is specific to understanding this war, we see the expansionist Israeli state launching a genocidal war against Palestinians in Gaza, at the same time as also launching a war against Lebanon, that already has clear aims of occupying large parts of Southern Lebanon and is carrying out bombing across the whole of the country. This is a scale of war that we haven’t seen for many decades.

 

And, of course, it also involves conflict between Israel and Iran, where there have already been terrifying exchanges of missile barrages.

 

I would argue this war is being driven by accelerating military competition at two levels of the global system. The first one is what people think of as where imperialist conflict takes place – competition between the big powers. There is a version of the theory of imperialism that tends to say that imperialism is the U.S. and its allies, and nobody else.

 

I would totally disagree with this. It’s very important to see imperialism driven by capitalist accumulation on a global scale. The U.S. is, of course, the biggest, most powerful state on the planet in many dimensions. But actually, its largest economic competitor, which has a larger economy, is China. And there is increasing military competition now between the U.S. and China in many areas. China, compared to the U.S., is a much weaker military power – you only have to look at what’s happening in the Pacific to see that.

 

There are also other competitors to the U.S. at a global level, one of which is Russia. The Russian economy is much smaller, and the Russian military is much smaller than the U.S., but it does have a large nuclear arsenal. Russia is an important player in global imperialist rivalries, but it’s not anything like on the same scale as the U.S./China rivalry.

 

So, where does that picture fit into what’s happening in the Middle East? We’ve seen over the last year that the actions of the Israeli state have been designed to pull the U.S. behind the strategy to smash the Palestinian population and to move towards a shift in the balance of power on a regional scale by striking severe blows at Iran.

 

How does this fit into the U.S.’ interest? It’s a contradictory process. One of the things that has been noticeable over the last year is the way in which the U.S. has feigned reluctance, and there’s clearly large sections of the U.S. ruling class who have been trying to put pressure on the Israelis to stop or to contain themselves within the limits of previous grounds of attacking Gaza, so as not to trigger a regional conflagration.

 

There are deeply contradictory things going on here. The Israeli state is supported by the U.S., it’s armed and funded by the U.S., they could shut off the supplies of weapons to Israel and refuse to do so. They shout about how Israel is going to blow up the whole of the region, while continuing to give them the bombs to blow up the whole of the region.

 

But there has been a genuine concern amongst some segments of the ruling class. You only have to look at statements from some of the key military figures who talk to the media to warn the Israelis about the possible consequences, if there were attacks on U.S. forces would the U.S. be able to defend Israel.

 

But there is a general sense in which the growing competition with China in the background and the way in which the U.S. has been bogged down in the war in Ukraine after Russia’s invasion, has left the U.S. with a massive dilemma, where relying on Israel to discipline other states in the region, to assert U.S. power, even to go beyond the bounds of what the U.S. wants to do itself is seen to make sense for a set of larger sections of the U.S. ruling class.

 

You can see this shift. In Lebanon, within a short space of time, the U.S. government went from telling the Israelis they should stop, to now saying that the removal of Hezbollah and its dismantling is something that the U.S. government wants to see as an outcome of this war.

 

So that competition at the top level of the global economy is one of the underlying things that has made the war what it is. And it’s worth remembering that the Middle East as a region retains an enormously important role in the global economy as a massive source of hydrocarbon exports, principally going to China now, shifting eastwards.

 

The U.S. is largely self-sufficient in terms of oil and gas. You have a decoupling of two parts of the global economy in a way that denying those resources to others is obviously seemingly important to the U.S., and also obviously to the arteries of world trade that they flow through like the Suez Canal.

 

That’s one level of the global competition, but it’s not the only one. There is also a regional competition which has been accelerating over the last few years between regional powers, of which Israel is one. Israel happens to be the one that is most closely allied with and it’s a special nature because of its settler-colonial origins, but it’s one of a set of regional powers competing for economic, political, military dominance.

 

The others are Iran, which has emerged in the wake of the disastrous U.S. invasion of Iraq as a much stronger regional power. It was able to intervene in Syria in a disastrous way – supporting the Syrian counter-revolution – and obviously has relations with Hezbollah in Lebanon. There’s also Turkey asserting itself as an imperialist power in the Mediterranean. And then there are the states of the Gulf. Many of the other regional states are jockeying around, making overtures to each other to try and avoid an all-out war. But there have been multiple signs of this competition underlying some of the developments over the last few years.

 

How does this relate to the question of the Palestinian liberation struggle? Because there’s a problem if we see the whole question as being reduced to the competition between states. The Palestinian struggle for liberation has been fundamentally important as an inspiration to people right across the region for decades, and the failure of the Israeli state to crush Palestinian resistance in all its forms – whether that’s armed struggle, or whether that’s cultural, social, political – the resistance of mass movements inside Palestine and in solidarity with the Palestinians has often played a role of helping to, not only inspire but feed into the development of revolutionary movements and mass movements around the region.

 

The system of imperialism and western domination is something that oppresses people right across the region. It’s a material fact in the misery that Egyptian workers experience because the oppressive state that governs them, which has taken billions of dollars in U.S. support over the years, is also one the Egyptian government that holds shut the gates of Gaza and has connived in the genocide unfolding there and in the siege of Gaza over more than a decade.

 

But one of the things that flows from the particular nature of the Nakba – the forced expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians that created the space for the Israeli state to exist – is that Palestinians on their own, without the support of wider social forces in the region are unlikely to overcome the Israeli state, however courageous the resistance they mount to Israeli terror and apartheid. If we think back to the whole idea of imperialism as something driven by capital accumulation itself, by the way in which capitalism develops both on the regional and on the global level, then actually it does follow from that that it’s the working class that has the greatest power in order to stop that.

 

The dispersal of the Palestinian working class across the region is one of the reasons why the Palestinian working class inside historic Palestine cannot, on its own, overcome that.

 

But the flip side is, because imperialism is a system that oppresses people right across the region, because there is a stake there for the continuation of imperialism among ruling classes from Egypt to Jordan to Lebanon to the Gulf, the possibility of a much broader and wider movement in solidarity with the Palestinians that could shake those states is something that really points the way to a future.

 

It’s through the power of the organized working class, in places like Egypt or potentially the Gulf or Jordan and elsewhere, that we could see how that could come to bear, as pushing forward the struggle from national liberation to the struggle for socialist revolution.

 

In a moment when we see the horrors unfolding in front of us in places like Gaza, we also have to remember that if we want to end this war, there has to be a revolutionary solution and it’s primarily in the region that that will come about. But our movement staying on the streets, organizing and trying to disrupt the Israeli war machine where we are, also can play its part.