Amnon Cohen
Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu visits Rishi Sunak on 24 March, at a time when both Israel and Britain are in unprecedented crisis. Half a million Israelis protested against Netanyahu’s plans to neuter the judiciary. The same week, 600,000 civil servants, teachers, rail workers and doctors took strike action demanding a pay rise in Britain on 15 March.
Both governments are attacking democratic rights. Both are undermining the right to strike. And both governments have been forced to retreat in the face of mass opposition.
Netanyahu, Ben-Gvir, and Smotrich in Israel, like Sunak in Britain, are products of the crisis of a diseased capitalist system, which cannot provide a decent life for the majority, and where politicians try to bolster electoral support by inciting division (in Israel against Arabs, in the UK against immigrants).
The threat to turn Israel into a despotic theocracy has brought half a million onto the streets. Attempts to intimidate the demonstrations using horses, water cannon, percussion grenades, and denouncing them as “anarchists”, has only strengthened protesters’ resolve, with greater numbers pouring onto the streets every week.
And Netanyahu has now been forced to try to placate the demonstrators by toning down his anti-democratic reforms. Rather than removing the power of the courts to block government actions, he now plans merely to take control of the judicial appointments committee, which will appoint a majority of right-wing judges who will green-light Netanyahu’s actions.
The Israeli and international capitalists are terrified of developments. Bankers, judges, tech CEOs, retired generals and secret service chiefs have joined the opposition. Their opposition to the government’s actions is not due to a sudden concern for the rights of Palestinians, or of the Jewish working class, but a fear that the government’s reckless actions will ignite new uprisings, or further conflict in the region which will threaten the value of their investments.
Hundreds of thousands are on the streets, but the leadership of the movement has been seized by capitalist establishment figures. The speaker lists at the democracy rallies are dominated by generals and security chiefs responsible for crushing the democratic rights of Palestinians for decades.
The masses did not take to the streets in order merely to win a gentler destruction of democracy. We need to bring down this racist anti-democratic government. But we cannot replace it with Yair Lapid, or any of the capitalist politicians who, until a few months ago, ruled in the interests of the billionaires, and whose failure paved the way for the return of Netanyahu.
New workers’ parties
In Israel, as in Britain, the working class needs to take control of its own struggle. This means a new workers’ party, with a socialist programme to tackle the cost-of-living crisis, and to unite working people, secular and religious, Jewish and Arab. Netanyahu and the far right won support from some of the most impoverished Jewish working-class communities. But the capitalist crisis will compel Netanyahu to attack their conditions even further. 10,000 demonstrating in Beer Sheva shows cracks in the support for the right. A workers’ party with a socialist programme to seize the wealth of the tycoons and corporations and improve the lives of working people can undermine support for the right.
The Palestinians are set to suffer the most from the government’s policies, and can be the most determined fighters against Netanyahu and Ben-Gvir. They should be welcomed into the movement. But this requires that the movement opposes not only the judicial reform, but also the oppression of the Palestinians, and the occupation itself. It is necessary to bring down not only the corrupt capitalist Netanyahu in Israel, but also the corrupt capitalist regime of Abu Mazen in the Palestinian Authority, and Haniyeh in Gaza. We need a socialist Palestinian state alongside a socialist Israeli state – linked together in a voluntary socialist federation.
The Hawara pogrom and its supporters in the government express the depth of the crisis of capitalist society. The powerful mass protest movement points to the solution. Only the struggle of the working-class masses, led by their own independent party, uniting all sections of the working class behind a socialist programme, can avert the descent into barbarism.
