Photo Above: A man evacuates a crying girl from a building in the southern Gaza city of Rafah that was destroyed by an Israeli air strike on October 9.
Photo credit: Khaled Omar/Xinhua

WAGE POLITICAL WAR AGAINST
BIDEN, ALBANESE, DUTTON & ALL
THE IMPERIALISTS ENABLING ISRAEL’S
NAZI-LIKE WAR ON GAZA’S PEOPLE!

11 October 2023: Israel is massacring the people of Gaza through indiscriminate air strikes. Seizing on Saturday’s attacks by Palestinian groups, Israel’s far-right government is waging all-out war on Gaza’s people. Already, Israel has stopped all food, electricity and water from entering Gaza. Defending this siege, Israeli defence minister Yoav Galland sounded exactly like a Nazi Holocaust-justifying, racial supremacist when he declared that: “We are fighting animals and are acting accordingly.” Given the Israeli regime’s racism, the especially fanatical nature of its present ultra-rightist government and the fact that Gaza is so densely populated, the current Israeli attack could end up killing literally tens of thousands of Palestinian people! Workers movements worldwide and all antiracists must build mass actions to demand: Stop the Israeli assault! Lift the blockade of Gaza! All Israeli troops and settlers out of the West Bank! We must stand with the Palestinian resistance against Israel’s mass-murdering onslaught.

Israel’s assault follows Saturday’s Palestinian raids. Cornered by rapid Israeli settlement expansion in the occupied West Bank, the intensification of mass-murdering Israeli West Bank raids and the savage Gaza blockade, Palestinian resistance forces struck back. With brilliant preparation and ingenuity, they overcame barriers hemming them inside Gaza to launch a surprise attack that killed hundreds of Israeli troops and police. The resistance forces inflicted more military casualties on the occupying forces in one weekend than Israel took during its entire failed 2006 war against Lebanon’s Hezbollah. We hail this Palestinian resistance against the murderous Israeli military. This is 100% justified!

Wrongly, the Hamas fighters also killed many civilians. Apart from aping the Israeli oppressors, such crimes play into the latter’s hands. They are being used by Israel’s unpopular Netanyahu government to restore support for its extreme racist stance. And they have been seized on by Western regimes to justify their support for Israel’s terror. Yet these attacks are the by-product of an occupation that has slaughtered Palestinian civilians in numbers that are dozens of times greater than Saturday’s civilian toll. It is true that the religious factions that attacked on Saturday are far less committed to protecting Jewish civilians than the secular – and especially the leftist-based–Palestinian resistance. However, some of these latter factions have lost credibility by submitting to the occupation. Yet such capitulation is itself an adaptation to the reality that Palestinians are heavily outgunned by an Israeli juggernaut built up by the West’s capitalist rulers.

Proving how much the Israeli regime is propped up by the Western rulers, Biden announced today that not only is he sending Israel new weapons but that U.S. “consultants” are “advising” Israel’s war. Moreover, the US has dispatched an aircraft carrier strike group to threaten Israel’s opponents. It is the U.S., Australian and other U.S.-allied rulers who are the root cause of both the terrible suffering of Palestinian people and the dangers faced by Israeli Jews – who must live in fear because of the inevitable response provoked by the horrific crimes of their Western-propped-up rulers.

DEFENDING THE PALESTINIAN PEOPLE MEANS
OPPOSING WESTERN IMPERIALISM’S
“RULES-BASED” WORLD ORDER

As the Israel regime began annihilating Palestinian civilians by bombing Gaza’s residential towers, Joe Biden, Anthony Albanese and other Western leaders declared their support for Israel’s “right to defend itself.” Then, when Israel imposed a deadly siege on Gaza, Australian foreign minister Penny Wong slimily justified this by stating that Israel’s military response is difficult to judge from afar. In other words, the Australian government is joining their U.S. allies in giving the Israeli regime the green light to use whatever genocidal methods it chooses to crush the people of Gaza.

To understand why the Western rulers prop up Israel, one must understand that these capitalist classes not only exploit their own workers but also gain huge profits from plundering the resources and superexploiting the workers of the ex-colonial countries of Asia, the Pacific, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America. Israel is a proxy of these U.S.-led imperialist ruling classes that acts to undermine forces within the Middle East that refuse to fully accept Western despotism. This is shown by Israel’s attacks on anti-Western forces in Lebanon, its threats against Iran and its air strikes against Syria. Israel has been built up by Western imperialism to perform these tasks. Israel’s terror against the Palestinian people is the true face of Western imperialism’s supposedly “rules-based” world “order”.

Anyone opposed to Israel’s terror must resist Israel’s Western enablers in every battle that these imperialists are waging to enforce their global tyranny. That means standing for the defence of Iran against U.S. threats – threats that have escalated over the last four days. This is even though Iran is ruled by a capitalist, women-oppressing regime. We say that the liberation of workers and women in Iran can only be made by her own masses. And especially given imperialism’s drive to bring a subservient regime to power in Iran, we insist that leftist forces there resist all Iranian opposition forces that accept support from Western regimes, while ensuring that they continue to fight for an Iranian workers state that would be more consistently opposed to imperialism than the current regime – not less.

While facilitating Israel’s terror, Western rulers are pouring huge amounts of arms into their proxy war against Russia in Ukraine. The more economically powerful Western powers want to reduce Russia – which is also capitalist-ruled – to the subordinate position that she was pushed down to in the 1990s and early noughties. Everyone opposed to imperialism should stand with Russia for the defeat of this proxy war. However, two left groups prominent in Palestine solidarity – Socialist Alternative and Socialist Alliance – are on the opposite side. They even support U.S. and Australian arms supplies to their Ukraine proxies! If the side that they are backing wins, the U.S.-led imperialists will be greatly strengthened and Israel’s rulers will have a more secure foundation from which to attack the Palestinian people.

The biggest danger to Western imperialist hegemony is the rise of socialistic China. Whereas the entire West is supporting Israel’s war on Gaza, China has called for an end to hostilities and insisted that the “fundamental way out of the conflict lies in … establishing an independent State of Palestine.” Yet this is short of the position that she should take. We call on China to do her socialist duty and unequivocally take the Palestinian side. However, China’s threat to imperialism is far greater than her direct position on Palestine. Her cooperation with the ex-colonial countries enables these countries to achieve greater independence from their imperial overlords. For one, this has encouraged many Arab states to move away from their previous support to imperialism’s proxy war against Syria – resulting in Syria’s readmission into the Arab League. More fundamentally, the success of China’s socialistic system in lifting her people’s living standards could eventually encourage the unhappy masses in the West to also take the socialist path by deposing their own rulers. That is why the capitalist powers are waging an intense Cold War against China. And that is why everyone suffering because of the tyranny of the Western rulers – the Palestinian people, the masses of the Global South and the working class masses in the West itself – must stand resolutely with socialistic China, despite her imperfect and still unfinished transition to socialism. Let us demand: Down with the U.S./Australian military build-up against China! Down with the lying propaganda attacks against China over “human rights”, Taiwan and Uyghurs!

BUILD WORKERS ACTION AGAINST THE
AUSTRALIAN GOVERNMENT’S SUPPORT FOR
ISRAEL’S WAR ON PALESTINIAN PEOPLE!

Given Australian rulers’ brutal subjugation of Aboriginal people, it is expected that they would support Israel’s occupation of Palestine. And given the horrific atrocities committed by the Australian rulers’ forces in Afghanistan it is little surprise that this ruling class would support its Israeli allies also committing war crimes. However, the Australian regime’s support for Israeli terror is not just due to such “shared values”, it is also based on its own self-interest. The Australian ruling class defends Israel because it wants the U.S.-dominated world order that Israel enforces to be protected. It is the U.S. godfather that enables Australian corporations’ plunder of the Pacific and beyond. Moreover, enraged that socialistic China’s cooperation with Pacific countries is making it harder for them to ride roughshod over these countries in the way that they previously did, Australia’s capitalists are counting on their U.S. senior partner to squeeze socialistic China to death. However, for these very same reasons, it is in the interests of the Australian working class to oppose both the Israeli regime and the U.S.-dominated world
order that underpins Israel’s terror. For any weakening of Australia’s capitalist ruling class makes it easier for the working class to resist the capitalists’ increasing exploitation of workers’ labour and the forcing of workers into ever more insecure jobs. This truth makes it possible to win workers to unleashing the desperately needed industrial action against Canberra’s support for Israel’s terror.

However, the ALP government’s fervent support for Israel’s war on Gaza shows the big obstacle we face to building such action. For this same ALP currently leads the workers movement. Many supporters of the Palestinian cause have painstakingly worked within the ALP for decades to try and shift its Palestine policy. The last few days shows how futile such efforts are. For any minor tinkering “achieved” is meaningless, because, at the critical moments, the ALP is right behind Israel’s war on the Palestinian people. The ALP takes this stance because that is what is in the interests of the Australian capitalist class which the ALP ultimately kowtows to. The struggle to build workers solidarity with the Palestinian people – just like the fight to mobilise the working class behind Aboriginal people’s struggle for liberation and its own struggle against capitalist exploitation – requires squeezing out the ALP from the leadership of the workers movement in favour of a new internationalist leadership that is implacably opposed to imperialism and capitalism.

COMPLETELY FALSE CLAIMS OF “ANTI-SEMITISM”
THROWN AT THE PALESTINE SOLIDARITY MOVEMENT

The likes of Albanese and Liberal leader Peter Dutton are not only unequivocally supporting Israel’s massacre of Gaza’s people but are also opposing all pro-Palestinian protests in Australia. They especially targeted Monday’s demonstration organised by the Palestine Action Group (PAG). That protest rightly marched on the Sydney Opera House to protest the deeply offensive decision to light the sails of the building with the Israeli flag just when the military fighting under that flag was bombing to death hundreds of children in Gaza. Now the NSW Police and NSW Labor premier, Chris Minns, are seeking to sabotage a Palestine solidarity protest called by the PAG for Sunday. Minns said that he will take action against the protest and will not allow the planned rally to “commandeer Sydney streets”. Acting Police Commissioner David Hudson threatened to shut down the protest saying, “In our opinion, it won’t be happening — it’s unauthorised at this stage.” This shows the bogus nature of the capitalist regime’s claims to stand for “democracy” and “free speech.” It is important that Sunday’s planned pro-Palestinian protest succeed at this critical time. We appeal to our readers to join the protest at 1pm on this Sunday, October 15 at Sydney’s Hyde Park Town Hall Square (note change in venue) to Stop the War on Gaza! We call on people to raise slogans at the rally in opposition to the U.S. and Australian rulers who prop up Israel’s tyranny and in opposition to the Western imperialist domination of the world that underpins Israel’s subjugation of Palestine.

To help them undermine any actions in support of the Palestinian people, Albanese, Dutton, Minns, the mainstream media and the pro-Israel lobby have, completely falsely, accused the Opera House protest of being “anti-Semitic.” They were abetted by the fact that a small number of idiotic people – mostly teens – who were around the Opera House for another reason entered the rally and started shouting disgusting anti-Semitic chants. To their credit, the PAG (which is dominated by the Socialist Alternative group that we criticised earlier for their stance on the Ukraine War) issued a powerful statement after the rally that denounced this tiny fringe and demolished the attempts to tarnish the overall action as being “anti-Semitic”:

“They were quickly condemned for their chants and asked to leave. Long-standing Palestinian organisers
and activists, Palestinian, Arab and Muslim elders attending the protest were disgusted and deplored by the
action. This is not what our movement stands for. We oppose Zionism, an ideology distinct from Judaism. We
oppose Israel, a racist state which has waged genocide on Palestinians. We are an anti-racist and anti-colonial
movement and we refuse to fight racism with racism.”

For the Australian rulers to claim to be concerned about anti-Semitism is rank hypocrisy. They are right now funneling huge quantities of military equipment to the Ukrainian Armed Forces that not only include particular neo-Nazi battalions – like the Azov Regiment – that seek the slaughter of Jews but avowedly stand on the traditions of World War II Ukrainian Nazi collaborator, Stepan Bandera. Bandera’s Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists massacred tens of thousands of Polish and Jewish people and took part in the Holocaust in Ukraine and Poland.

Moreover, the Zionist project that the Western ruling classes back is hardly the sanctuary for Jews that the Zionist rulers claim it to be. As we explained in our article five months ago when Israel demolished a Palestinian school at the Jabbet al-Dhib village in the West Bank:

“The Israeli occupation is hell for Palestinian people. But life in Israel is not that great for the Jewish masses either. Zionist rulers promised that Israel would create a sanctuary for Jews to escape discrimination and racist oppression in Europe – an idea that only gained wide appeal following the Holocaust. However, the idea of building a nation in a land by expelling its existing inhabitants will necessarily breed resistance by the dispossessed people of that land. And so while Palestinians are overwhelmingly the victims of violence in their homeland, the Zionist project incites attacks on Jewish inhabitants too. Moreover, a state where Jewish youth must endure a compulsory military service of up to three years and where residents are frequently running into bomb shelters is hardly a `peaceful sanctuary’. Far from protecting Jewish people, the Zionist project, based as it is on ethnic cleansing, has made Israel’s Jews the objects of hatred on the part of their neighbours.”

Last Saturday’s events have tragically proven the correctness of these points. The only people that the Zionist project does actually serve are the U.S. imperialists and their allies – who need a reliable deputy sheriff in the strategically located Middle East – and the Israeli capitalist class. These latter capitalists exploit the workers of their country just like capitalists everywhere else. As our article insisted:

“A section of the Jewish working class must be won to the understanding that the only way that they can put an end to their own exploitation and create a truly peaceful home is by linking up with neighbouring Arab workers and with the Palestinian people’s resistance in a joint struggle to smash the racist Israeli capitalist regime and create a secular, socialist Palestine where Palestinians and Jews can live together in equality.”

What keeps Israel’s Jewish working class loyal to the Jewish capitalist rulers that exploit them is the intense racial/religious supremacist ideas that Zionism is based on. Given the intensity of this chauvinism, it will take workers’ uprisings in other parts of the Middle East to finally bring class-struggle sentiments to the fore amongst the Israeli working class. However, given the massive Western support for Israel (including economic aid that brings the Israeli working class a fairly privileged position relative to their Arab neighbours and that in turn contributes much to their current subservience to the Zionist project), the imperialist meddling in the Arab world that shores up the current social order and the fact that the mass killings of Israeli civilians last weekend has only magnified Zionist chauvinism in Israel many times over, the liberation of Palestine is inconceivable right now without mass struggle within the Western countries against the imperialist backers of Israel.

That means that leftist supporters of Palestine in U.S.-allied Australia have a huge responsibility. We can make a great contribution to the Palestinian people’s liberation by building mass workers’ actions to oppose the Australian rulers’ support for Israel’s subjugation of Palestine and oppose the entire Western domination of the world that underpins Israel’s tyranny over Palestine. Helping us to mobilise such struggles is the fact that large parts of the population distrust Australia’s ruling elite as their reign is only bringing the masses unaffordable living costs, steeply rising rents and economic insecurity.

FIGHT FOR THE LIBERATION OF PALESTINE
BY WORKING TO TOPPLE WESTERN IMPERIALIST
TYRANNY OVER THE WORLD

Western imperialism’s domination of the world is far from secure. Western capitalist economies are lurching from crisis to crisis, their populations are cynical about their so-called “democracies” and capitalist rule in the West itself is facing an eventual existential threat from the inspirational effect of socialistic China’s successes. Under all these stresses, the capitalist ruling classes in the West are deeply divided. However, these imperialist ruling classes will not fall by themselves. In fact, what we are seeing is that these capitalist classes are doing everything possible to preserve their power. In many countries, they are turning to evermore vile, far-right parties to administer their systems – something that their Israeli proxies have done too. In the end, they will even be prepared to implement the horrific, fascist form of capitalism, as the German capitalists did in the 1930s, to keep themselves in power. Moreover, the savagery of the Israeli war on Gaza that they are avidly backing shows the brutality that the Western imperialists are capable of when that is what is needed to protect their tyranny. It is a sign that they will be prepared to kill millions of people by unleashing a catastrophic war on socialistic China if they feel that this is what it takes to crush a threat to their capitalist domination of the globe.

So let us work with all our energy to build struggles against the increasingly dangerous, Western imperialist ruling classes. Let us stand by the socialistic China that “threatens” Western imperialist domination of the world! Let us build actions in Australia, the U.S. and other Western countries against each of our own rulers’ support for Washington’s Israeli proxies! Let us stand with the people of Gaza by waging political war against the Australian, U.S. and other Western rulers that enable Israel’s Nazi-like war. Let us mobilise vigorous class-struggle resistance that will shake the foundations of the Australian, U.S. and other Western regimes so intensely that the Israeli regime that they uphold will topple over! That is the best way that supporters in Australia of the oppressed Palestinian people can fight for the liberation of Palestine.