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/ CLASS WAR / We publish here our English translation of a small contribution made by AST comrades from Germany who recently intervened among others last May at the Action Week in Prague and in September at the Anarchist Bookfair in Berlin-Kreuzberg. These comrades are taking a courageous and uncompromising stand in the bloody conflict tearing Israel and Palestine apart, and particularly against the two jaws of the same trap that is crushing our class on the altar of nationalism. We must have the militant courage to proclaim loud and clear, once again, that there is no statist solution to the despicable situation of proletarians subjected to capitalist exploitation: neither one State nor two States, nor from the River to the Sea – abolition of all Nation-States!
It’s also worth noting that AST comrades, while openly siding with our class brothers and sisters in struggle in Israel and Palestine, call for “antinational solidarity” instead of internationalism. Although we don’t use the concept of antinationalism in our writings, we can well understand the acuteness of the problem as a result of the genuine nauseating practice of all these pseudo-internationalists who defend one bourgeois faction (Palestine, Ukraine…) against another (Israel, the USA, Russia…) ad nauseam!
As we’ve written before: “Internationalism is not the addition of various or even different nationalisms or all nationalisms, but on the contrary its complete and accomplished negation…”
CW.
Pro-Zionist and pro-Palestinian trade unions divide the world proletariat
Zionism and Palestinian nationalism
The Zionist regime in Israel and Palestinian nationalism are among the worst and most bloodthirsty dividers of the world proletariat. In a competitive division of labor, they organize the permanent slaughter of the Jewish and Palestinian civilian population. The founding act of the Zionist terror regime in Israel in 1948 included the nationalist expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians. Since 1967, Israeli imperialism has occupied the Palestinian territories of East Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Israel is a racist apartheid State. It racially exploited the Palestinian proletariat in a particularly hard way and prevented the emergence of a Palestinian economic bourgeoisie. Only a pathetic Palestinian political bourgeoisie emerged, which is striving for its own nation State, which, as always, can only be capitalist and social-reactionary.
Palestinian nationalism is a structural class enemy of the world proletariat. From the Islamist Hamas to Fatah/PLO to the Marxist-Leninist organizations DFLP and PFLP. They are all ready to murder Jewish civilians. Nationalist anti-Zionism merges seamlessly into anti-Judaism. For Hamas, the PFLP and the DFLP, the Palestinian petty bourgeoisie and proletarians are merely cannon-fodder, which they ruthlessly sacrifice in their bloody competition against Israel. No Palestinian nationalism can help against Zionist oppression, but only the possible world social revolution, which will leave nothing of Israel or any other State.
On October 7, 2023, Palestinian nationalists attacked Israel from the Gaza Strip and massacred the Jewish civilian population. They also took hostages. Hamas & Co. thus gave the Zionist regime the pretext for the mass murder of the Palestinian civilian population. Israel’s political apparatus of violence murdered over 46,000 people in the Gaza Strip – until the ceasefire agreement of January 15, 2025 came into force on January 19, 2025. But one thing is certain: the permanent slaughter will continue. The Zionists and the Lebanese Islamist militia Hezbollah, which is supported by Iranian imperialism, also fought out their bloody competition at the expense of the Israeli and Lebanese civilian population.
Histadrut’s general strike on September 2, 2024
Only the fraternization of Jewish and Palestinian proletarians on a class-struggle-revolutionary basis can help against the carnage organized by Zionism and Palestinian nationalism on the basis of a division of labor and competition. At the same time, the world proletariat must prevent the arming of Zionism and Palestinian nationalism through class-struggle actions. But the class struggle in 2023/24 was neither that far in Israel/Palestine nor world-widely. The Israeli proletariat was and is too deeply integrated into Zionism and the Palestinian proletariat into the corresponding nationalism.
However, although the majority of Israeli wage laborers were deeply integrated into Zionism, a larger national pacifist movement developed in early September 2024. This movement was not fundamentally opposed to Israel’s war against the Gaza Strip, but wanted to achieve a ceasefire and the release of the hostages that Hamas had abducted during its attack on Israel on October 7, 2023. Due to the pressure, the Zionist trade union Histadrut, which is deeply integrated into the Israeli State, was forced to call a general strike on September 2, 2024, which was ended by court order.
Jakob Reimann wrote in Die junge Welt about the quickly ended general strike in Israel on September 2, 2024:
“At least for a few hours, parts of the country were at a standstill: throughout Israel on Monday (September 2, 2024), many banks and stores remained closed, buses and trains did not run, and planes at Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv were also grounded after the largest trade union, Histadrut, called on its hundreds of thousands of members to go on general strike. Mass protests had already taken place in several cities across the country on Sunday (September 1, 2024), with half a million people reportedly calling on the extreme right-wing government under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to finally agree to a ceasefire with Hamas and the release of the 101 hostages believed to remain in the Gaza Strip.
The civil disobedience was triggered by the announcement late on Saturday (August 31, 2024) that the Israeli military had recovered the bodies of six more hostages from a tunnel in the south of the coastal enclave, which had been reduced to rubble. The victims were said to have been alive shortly beforehand. According to AP, three of them had been released in the first phase of the agreement negotiated in July (2024), which failed to materialize due to a blockade by Netanyahu.
The reaction of the ultra-right-wing government to the general strike was to be expected. Instead of helping the Israeli economy in times of war, Histadrut chairman Arnon Bar-David was “in fact fulfilling (Hamas leader, JW) Sinwar’s dream”, claimed extreme right-wing Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich at a press conference on Sunday (September 1, 2024), according to the Times of Israel; Bar-David represented “the interests of Hamas”. Minister Yitzhak Wasserlauf, meanwhile, called for changes to the law that would make it possible to personally prosecute the union leader and assert claims for damages against him.
Around noon on Monday (September 2, 2024), the Israeli Labor Court finally granted a petition by Finance Minister Smotrich and ordered the strike to end at 2:30 p.m. (local time). Histadrut head Bar-David respects the court’s decision, according to a statement quoted by Times of Israel. The union official, who is considered close to the government, thanked the “hundreds of thousands of citizens” before slipping into the costume of a strikebreaker: “We live in a constitutional State and we respect the court’s decision, so I am instructing everyone to return to work at 2.30pm,” Bar-David said, according to Reuters.
Meanwhile, the Forum of Hostages and Missing Families, which was formed after October 7 (2023), is calling for the protests to continue. It is not about a strike, “but about rescuing the 101 hostages who were abandoned by Netanyahu”. The Forum had again announced a large number of protests across the country for the evening, including in front of Netanyahu’s home. However, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir made it unmistakably clear that the government, especially the ultra-right coalition partners, had no interest in releasing the hostages. “Today we have the power in the government,” the fascist told his supporters on Monday (September 2, 2024), and “I am not ashamed to say that we are using this power to prevent a reckless agreement and stop any negotiations”.”
# Jakob Reimann, Streik ohne Biss [Strike without bite], in: Junge Welt from September 3, 2024, p.1. #
It was clear from the accounts how the Zionist Histadrut bowed to the capitalist dictatorship, the only democracy in the Middle East. The trade union did not conduct the general strike that ended in court as a class struggle of wage workers against national capital. The Histadrut mobilized wage earners to a limited extent in an intra-bourgeois conflict.
Ido Arad stated quite correctly:
“The Israeli trade union federation Histadrut called on Monday (September 2, 2024) for an agreement to free the hostages by organizing a general strike. But this protest should not be misunderstood as a call for an end to the war in Gaza. Histadrut continues to share the two declared goals of the Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government: to wipe out Hamas and, at the same time, to free the Israeli hostages. Even if the goals have meant an irresolvable tension between two opposing interest groups in Israeli society from the outset.
The first, right-wing conservative group remains loyal to Netanyahu and is willing to support him even at the cost of hostages being killed. It sees the destruction of Gaza and the West Bank as an opportunity to create new conditions in the occupied territories. The other group, the liberals, see the hostage dilemma as a symbol of Netanyahu’s moral corruption. The protest movement for the release of the hostages is a further stage in this group’s struggle to finally get rid of the unpopular Israeli government. (…)
This social tension erupted with the news of six hostages killed in the form of the general strike on Monday (September 2, 2024). But the supporters of the strike and the demonstrators have their own “pragmatic” view on Israel’s war against Gaza: the government should first reach an agreement to free the hostages. Then it could return to the second, no less important task of destroying Hamas. The war crimes committed by the Israeli army, the starvation caused by Israel and the widespread diseases are of little importance compared to the fight against Netanyahu and his government. (…)
Moreover, the Histadrut strike did not arise from an impulse of the labor movement in Israel. Nor does it correspond in any way to its interests.”
# Ido Arad, Keine Kriegsgegner [Not Anti-War], in: Junge Welt from September 3, 2024, p.8. #
No, the general strike of September 2, 2024, which was ended by the courts, was not a proletarian class struggle against mass murderous Zionism. The Histadrut organized it in the interests of the liberal faction of Israeli national capital. This liberal faction is just as mass-murderous as the right-wing conservative-fascist faction – and not only in Israel.
The pro-Palestinian trade union demonstration on October 20, 2024
As we have already written, it is an expression of proletarian class-struggle solidarity when workers in the logistics sector prevent the transportation of weapons to theaters of war. On the contrary, a demonstration of solidarity with “Palestine” organized by trade unions is only to a very limited extent an interprofessional class struggle in the form of a street movement dominated by wage earners. Moreover, “solidarity with Palestine” is a left-wing nationalist bullshit. Revolutionaries fight against all nationalisms as divisive practices and ideologies of the world proletariat – including Zionism and Palestinian nationalism.
Gerrit Hoeckman wrote about the left-wing nationalist pro-Palestine demonstration in Belgium in October 2024 in the left-wing reactionary filthy rag Junge Welt:
“According to the police, around 32,000 people demonstrated in Brussels on Sunday (October 20, 2024) for a ceasefire in Gaza and Lebanon. The organizers counted over 70,000 participants. Belgian trade unions were also in the thick of it. “Israel has been violating international law with impunity for decades. Only international pressure can put an end to this and bring justice to the Palestinian people,” the socialist trade union ABVV-FGTB stated on its website.
[AST’s note: The “Palestinian people” is an ideological abstraction. It is divided into the political bourgeoisie, the petty bourgeoisie and the proletariat. The petty bourgeoisie and the proletariat are the cannon-fodder of the nationalist political bourgeoisie and politicizing petty bourgeoisie. Solidarity with the “Palestinian people” is social reactionary solidarity with Palestinian nationalism!]
The demands are clear: an immediate and permanent ceasefire, the protection of all civilians and the release of all prisoners. The “occupation and colonization of the Palestinian territories”, which violates international law, must be ended in the same way as the “apartheid policy”. This is only possible through political and economic pressure. The ABVV-FGTB demands a comprehensive arms embargo against Israel. The Belgian government must also campaign for a suspension of the Association Agreement between the EU and Israel in order to hinder or prohibit trade and investment. Any cooperation with the illegal Israeli settlements on the West Bank must be completely prohibited. The ABVV-FTGB supports South Africa’s lawsuit against Israel before the International Court of Justice in The Hague.
[AST’s note: The socialist trade union bosses support Palestinian nationalism, which is also a playing card of another State. In this way, the socialist trade union apparatus is mobilizing wage workers for the global competition between nations. In this struggle, the ANC killer regime in South Africa, which is taking very bloody action against the proletariat, is mobilizing against Israel. We stand for the proletarian class struggle against Israel, but fight the nationalist mobilization against the Zionist regime.]
“As trade unionists, we stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people, their trade unions and workers, who are also suffering greatly from the economic and human consequences of the occupation and genocide,” according to “Jong ABVV”, the Flemish youth organization of the socialist trade union, which explained on its website why a united block of the trade union at the solidarity demonstration was important.
“Any glorification of war crimes, attacks on civilians or any expression of anti-Semitism, Islamophobia or any other form of racism will lead to expulsion,” according to the young trade unionists staff who reminded the participants the code of conduct. “Only the Palestinian national flag is allowed.” Everyone complied. As far as we know, there were no incidents. The demonstrators only shouted their slogans peacefully but loudly.
[AST’s note: The Palestinian national flag, like all nationalist symbols, should be trampled in the dirt.]
The Belgian trade unions were among the first in Europe to speak out against arms deliveries to Israel. “We, the various unions active in the ground-handling sector, call on our members to stop handling flights carrying military equipment,” they said in a joint statement back in November 2023.
Here and there, working people are actually throwing sand in the gears of the war machine. The last time this happened was on the night of October 19 (2024) in Piraeus, Greece, where dock workers prevented the loading of ammunition for Israel.
Although the trade unions in Germany advocate the two-State solution and call for an immediate ceasefire, they only express well-tempered criticism of Israel’s actions in the Gaza Strip. “Political statements in trade unions, especially on issues related to war and migration, are often held back by the fact that they should or may “only” deal with labor issues,” complained the Berlin regional branch of the Education and Science Workers’ Union (GEW) early July (2024). GEW’s national office responded two weeks later with another appeal without bite: “The Israeli government must immediately fulfill its responsibility to protect the civilian population in Gaza, to ensure their supplies and end the existing humanitarian catastrophe.”
Some at grassroots level are fed up with the fine words. The Berlin network “Trade Unionists for Gaza”, for example, is demanding that arms deliveries to Israel must be stopped immediately. And in an open letter to the DGB in the summer, a group of trade unionists from Munich stated: “Silence is not an option”.”
# Gerrit Hoeckman, In Belgien geht was [Things are moving around in Belgium], in: Junge Welt from October 24, 2024, p.15. #
In very clear terms: the trade union demonstration on October 20, 2024 in Belgium was left-wing nationalist and therefore absolutely socially reactionary – just like the pro-Zionist marches all over the world!
When arms supplies to Israel are blocked, we support this. However, when such actions are linked to the production of a pro-Palestinian nationalist ideology, we criticize this.
The situation in Germany: The Zionists are carrying out their bloody work with the friendly support of German imperialism. While the German fascists once murdered six million European Jews, the German democrats are today helping to keep the Zionist mass murder going by supplying arms to Israel. This is anti-fascist coming to terms with the past and at the same time the bloody continuity of German imperialism.
Just as the German Nazis once determined who was a Jew, today German democrats determine who is an “anti-Semite”. According to these experts, Jews who harshly criticize the terrorist State of Israel are also “anti-Semites”. The ruling democrats are cracking down on Palestine solidarity, which we criticize from antinational positions. We fundamentally reject State repression in favor of the Zionist murderous regime. And we fight against the fact that pro-Zionism and pro-Palestinian nationalism divide the proletariat in Germany as well.
The DGB is the trade union federation of German imperialism. The DGB bigwigs supported the NATO war in Yugoslavia in 1999, the armament of the Kiev regime and the economic war against Russia since 2022 as well as the mass murderous State of Israel. On October 10, 2023, the DGB declared its solidarity with the Zionist mass murderers. IG Metall defends the jobs (and therefore exploitation) in the German production of murder tools. The fact that the DGB also includes a police union, the Gewerkschaft der Polizei (GdP), fits like a glove. The whole association is a plain-clothes cop of the German State against the class-struggle revolutionary proletariat. The DGB is the worst of our class enemies. It cannot be reformed in a class-struggle-social-emancipatory way. The DGB must be revolutionarily smashed in the long term!
For the revolutionary destruction of Zionism and Palestinian nationalism!
Down with German imperialism!
Long live antinational solidarity!
Antipolitical Social Revolutionary Tendency (AST)
English translation: BLESK
