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For two years, the genocidal destruction of Gaza by the U.S. and Israeli bosses has horrified workers around the world. The Zionist regime used bombing of homes and infrastructure, mass starvation and disease to kill and displace as many Gazans as possible. According to Nature more than 84,000 workers in Palestine had been killed in Gaza by January 2025,1 and the medical journal Lancet estimated the real number of deaths to be at least 186,000 as of July, 2024, or 3-15 times the official number.2
The “peace” deal unfolding as we write this in October, 2025 will subject Gazans to ongoing occupation and subjugation as the Israelis, the US and local Arab regimes unite to continue the exploitation of Palestinians and resources. Nor is there any guarantee that this ceasefire will hold. Israel agreed to such a proposal in early 2025, but on March 17 launched brutal airstrikes that claimed the lives of over 400 Gazans, the majority of whom were women and children. In the West Bank (WB), Israel has killed about 1000 Palestinians as of July, displaced nearly 40,000, has arrested over 14,000, and is expanding settlements as part of a planned annexation of the entire area.3,4 Beyond Gaza, Israel’s top fascist, Benjamin Netanyahu, unilaterally ordered assassinations, exploded booby-trapped pagers in open markets in Lebanon, and carpet bombed Iran, Lebanon and Syria.
Across the globe, masses of workers have increasingly cried out in solidarity with their sisters and brothers in Gaza. In demonstrations large and small, chants and signs condemned Israel and its U.S. backers, who have supplied tens of billions of dollars in every variety of weapon and war machine to fuel this imperialist massacre. Even many international agencies, Israeli humanitarian organizations, and European governments labeled the Zionist slaughter a genocide. When the Israeli regime bombed Doha, Qatar last month, even Arab regimes that have allowed the Zionists to kill Palestinian workers with impunity, began to object. Now they will cooperate with Israeli and US rulers to “peacefully” dominate Palestinians. The unwavering support that they, like Biden and Harris, provided to Israel will indict them in the history books as collaborators in mass murder. Under the open fascism of Trump, genocide is now openly supported by the U.S.
Netanyahu – and the rest of the world – knows that Israel is key to U.S. foreign policy and U.S. imperialism. By controlling the Middle East and its vast fossil fuel resources and trade routes, the U.S. controls the global oil trade underpinning the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency. But where a U.S./Israeli alliance used to project strength and power, it is quickly isolating the U.S in world opinion and threatening to pull the U.S. military into the quagmire of war. Donald Trump and his fascist cabinet are continuing the longstanding U.S. imperialist tradition of enabling Israel’s so-called ‘right to defend itself.’ Just weeks ago, Trump greenlit this latest genocidal attack by approving billions more in military aid, which now totals over $20 billion since 2023,5 as Israel is still not deviating from its goal of taking over all of the occupied territories.
China and Russia, the biggest capitalist rivals of the U.S., are moving in to make missile and technology deals with Iran and to challenge the dominance of the U.S. dollar.6 They are building ever larger ties with Saudi Arabia for oil in exchange for billions of dollars in weapons and technology.7 Capitalism is based on competition over which bosses can best exploit the working class and reap the biggest profits. All capitalists, large and small, must expand to become the top dog, or die. Against a global backdrop of inter-imperialist rivalry, shifting power dynamics among the U.S, China and Russia, along with sharpening regional instability, this powder keg threatens to explode into World War III.
Whenever and however World War III begins, capitalist bosses, large and small, will call on workers to line up behind one national flag or another to kill and be killed in battles to determine which of them will control the world’s lands and resources. In many of the demonstrations against the U.S-backed Israeli genocide in Gaza, people wave Palestinian flags and chant for a free Palestine. But there can be no freedom for workers in Palestine or any place in the world under capitalism. We stand shoulder-to-shoulder with workers’ fightbacks against genocide and fascism, but we must struggle to make it a fight against imperialism and capitalism.
We abhor all misleaders who divert workers’ fury into nationalist fervor and use it as cover for their own brand of capitalism. All nations today are run by capitalists, and a fatal mistake of the old communist movement was caving in to nationalism, uniting with “lesser evil” capitalists and abandoning revolution for workers’ power in favor of capitalism run by local bosses. The leaders of Hamas and Fatah, who do not have state power, also divert workers’ fury into nationalist fervor, and use it as cover for their own brand of capitalism.
Progressive Labor Party (PLP) rejects the division and pillage of the world and the working class for the wealth and profit of the capitalist class. The International working class has no nation! Like the communists in Russia during World War I (WWI) and the communists in China during the 1940s, the working class of the world today can and must turn imperialist war into communist revolution. Although it is imperative to examine why those revolutions devolved back to capitalism, we must learn from mistakes of the past and strive to build a communist world led by and for the workers of the world.
In this pamphlet, we will examine how capitalist/imperialist competition led to the creation of Israel, why the alliance between the U.S. bosses and Israel highlights the growing weakness of U.S. imperialism, and how nationalism has continuously proved deadly for the working class.
Imperialist Competition Created Israel
For several hundred years before WWI, present day Palestine and many other Middle Eastern countries were part of the Turkish Ottoman empire. When oil, first discovered in the region in the early 1900s, became the world’s major industrial and military fuel, capitalists in Europe and the U.S. took increasing interest in control of the area and its vast resources. During WWI, the most powerful Western imperialist, Great Britain, encouraged nationalism among various Arab groups previously exploited by the Ottoman empire and enlisted them to fight with Britain against Turkey and Germany. In exchange, Great Britain held out the promise of a Pan-Arab independent state after the war.
At the same time as they were promising a state to the Arabs, the British promised a national home in Palestine to the Zionists in the Balfour Declaration of 1917. Under the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement (1916), they also promised to divide Arab lands amongst their WWI allies. Post war, the British kept only the last two promises. Support for a pan-Arab country was quickly replaced by the creation of smaller colonies: Palestine, Transjordan, Iraq, Egypt, and Kuwait, all controlled by Britain, and Syria and Lebanon, controlled by France.
Before Palestine became a British Mandate, it was occupied by diverse groups of Jews and Arabs, many of whom were farmers and herders. Some of the Jews living in Palestine, about 5% of the total population, had emigrated from Russia and Europe to escape the brutal anti-Jewish racism of tsarist pogroms and intense marginalization of Jewish workers throughout Europe. Some were inspired by a nascent Zionist movement. During the 19th and early 20th centuries, capitalists encouraged nationalism to solidify the development of nation-states and colonial and imperialist control of resources around the world. Within this context, the Zionist movement grew.
The leadership of the Zionist movement came from the petit bourgeoisie (small bosses) and the educated elite. The British bosses supported the Zionist leaders’ call for mass emigration of Jews to Palestine because they believed that a large group of middle-class Europeans could provide military and political support against the demands of Arab nationalism. The Zionists, too, favored the immigration of more well-off Jews over Jewish workers to populate their future state of Israel. One example of a Zionist ploy to favor wealthy Jews in Hungary in 1944 was a bargain with the Nazis to select which richer Jews would be allowed to escape to Palestine. Thousands of Jewish workers were then sent to the gas chambers, having been told the lie that the trains were headed to a fictitious resettlement camp.8
The Israeli state was created by the United Nations in 1948, following massive Jewish immigration in response to Nazism. The U.S. and Britain would allow only a trickle of Jewish refugees from the Holocaust to enter their own countries before, during, and after World War II, so many thousands were forced to go to Palestine even though they would have preferred to go west. With Israeli statehood granted, the Zionists were anxious to build their population and an army to defend the new country. They not only welcomed more Holocaust refugees than the U.S. but also encouraged immigration of Jews from other Middle Eastern and North African countries.9
When statehood was granted, the Jews were given 55 percent of the land, including the best water supplies, although they owned only six percent of the land at the time and comprised 30 percent of the population. The Arabs objected to the unfairness of this plan, as did the Zionist leadership, who wanted all of Palestine. The Zionist rulers began a long-planned program of terrorization and forced displacement of 700,000-900,000 Palestinians, six out of seven Arabs who then lived in what is now Israel. This process was facilitated by a secret deal with Jordan, the only well-armed Arab state, which was rewarded with Jordanian control of the West Bank. Many of the refugees were forced into what are now the West Bank and Gaza, while others fled to neighboring countries. To Palestinians this ethnic cleansing is known as the Nakba, or catastrophe.
Today, Zionist rulers and their followers continue to use the trauma of the Nazi slaughter of six million Jews as justification for their genocidal, apartheid system. Instead of viewing the Holocaust as one of the worst examples of how a capitalist ruling class used racism to explain away capitalism’s flaws to maintain power, they call it the worst example of the anti-Semitism that is supposedly embedded in all non-Jews. Instead of comparing the Nazi Holocaust to the deportation and mass killing of 12 million Africans as slaves or the murder of 1.5 million Armenians by Turks, or other historical examples, they portray the Holocaust as an event apart, which can only be solved by Jews establishing a state where they have absolute power. To the religious, Zionists preach that God gave Israel to the Jews thousands of years ago, that Jews are God’s chosen people. From an early age, they indoctrinate Israeli children with hatred of Arabs and glorification of the Israeli military, in which all must serve.10
In Palestine, before the mass Jewish immigration of the early 1900s, the Jewish population lived peacefully with their Arab neighbors even as anti-Jewish pogroms raged in Europe. But even the earliest Zionists knew that the indigenous population would have to be removed to create a Jewish state. Despite recruiting immigrants to Palestine in the late 1800s by claiming it was empty, Zionism’s founder Theodor Herzl declared the need to be rid of Palestinians, be it by extermination or displacement.11 This sentiment was echoed by the first Israeli Prime Minister Ben Gurion – “I am for compulsory transfer; I do not see anything immoral in it” – and all ruling politicians since.12 It is clear that Israel’s genocide in Gaza and the increased violence in the West Bank is an attempt to finally make this wish come true.
U.S. Cold War Foreign Policy
At the close of WWII, the U.S. organized its foreign policy around the economic advantages of rebuilding Europe, securing control of Middle Eastern oil, and the strategic need to contain the spread of Soviet influence. From the 1930s onward, U.S. oil companies took control in Saudi Arabia. Post-war, the U.S. engineered coups in Iran and Iraq and made deals with nationalist leaders in Egypt and Syria. In all of these countries U.S. efforts were helped by local nationalists, who sided with the U.S. against the British, hoping the U.S. would be a kinder partner.
Balancing its interests in oil and in the containment of Soviet influence, the U.S. under Truman quickly offered formal recognition of Israel, but not military support. Israel, at first, was careful not to openly favor either the Soviet Union or the U.S., and Truman was careful not to offend the Arab countries as many, including Egypt, accepted military aid from the Soviet Union. Maintaining positive relationships with Saudi Arabia and other Arab nations was crucial to U.S. economic interests.
It wasn’t until Israeli Prime Minister Ben Gurion succeeded in weakening pro-Soviet support within Israel and expressed support for the U.S. during the Korean War that Israel signaled its willingness to serve as a U.S. defender against Soviet influence in the region. Still, the U.S. was reluctant to abandon any Arab states to full Soviet influence and withheld military aid from Israel.12a
Ultimately, the U.S. could no longer support Egyptian President Nasser’s Pan-Arab movement, and the U.S. fully committed to Israel. In 1967 Israel launched a victorious war, with U.S. support, to defeat the Pan-Arab movement. Egypt was driven out of Gaza, Jordan was driven out of the West Bank and Jerusalem, Syria out of the Golan Heights, and the longest military occupation of modern history began.
By 1969, the last British troops had left the Middle East, the U.S. became the greatest supporter of Israel, and by 1980 U.S. aid to Israel had become greater than that to the rest of the world combined. As Nixon’s Secretary of State Alexander Haig said: “Israel is the largest American aircraft carrier in the world that cannot be sunk, does not carry even one American soldier, and is located in a critical region for American national security.”13 In 1980, President Carter declared in his State of the Union address that the United States would use military force if necessary to defend its national interests, defined as the free flow of oil in the Persian Gulf Region, a policy that came to be known as the Carter Doctrine.
After WWII, Israel was part of a triple base of support for the U.S. in the Middle East, which also included Saudi Arabia and Iran. In 1953, the U.S. directed a coup in Iran to replace the elected leftist government and place the Shah in power, but he was overthrown by an Islamic movement in 1979. Saudi Arabia has lately been waffling in its loyalties between the West and China. They recently signed a pact with Iran at China’s behest and have, as of yet, refused to sign the U.S. sponsored Abraham Accords with Israel. Saudia Arabia and Israel were close to signing this “normalization” deal in 2023, but the Hamas October 7th attack and Israel’s subsequent genocidal scorched-earth military campaign in Gaza may have foiled any future peace between the two rivals.14
In 1993, Israel agreed to deal with the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), the political leaders of Palestinians, and an accord was signed in Oslo. A new “independent” Palestinian Authority (PA), under control of the local branch of the PLO, Fatah, was established to administer the West Bank, but Israel maintained complete or partial control of over 80% of the territory. Although the PA became responsible for services like health and education, two thirds of their revenue and all the movement of goods and people would be controlled by Israel, which persists today. The PA also cooperated with Israel on security, mostly to control anti-Zionist uprisings. The West Bank now contains nearly 700 internal and border checkpoints, through which Palestinians require a permit to cross and are subject to long waits and searches. Israel also built many Jewish settlements in the West Bank, that have now grown to over 600,000 inhabitants. Recently the Israeli government has expressed its intention to annex the entire West Bank and is planning settlements to cut off Palestinians from the capital, Jerusalem.15
