For months there has been a real risk of the Middle East tipping into region-wide war. It would extend wider the brutal horrors being inflicted on the Palestinians in Gaza, where at the time of writing nearly 40,000 Gazans have been killed, over 90,000 wounded.
A rocket landing on a football pitch in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights in the north east, killing 12 children and teenagers, is the latest harrowing trigger of instability.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, blaming Hezbollah – a paramilitary group based in Lebanon – is calibrating a military response. He does so with world capitalist leaders urging ‘restraint’. They are terrified of what a regional war will mean, not because of their concerns for the inevitable devastation of the lives of working-class and poor people in the region, but because of the social unrest that can come with it and what it means for their profit interests.
Complicit
For ten months, capitalist leaders have made mealy-mouthed appeals to stop the Israeli state’s slaughter in Gaza. In reality, the capitalist politicians are complicit in the relentless cruelty. The new Labour government in Britain has still not stopped arms exports to Israel, something Britain has done numerous times in previous decades. And Joe Biden’s US government has provided more than $12.5 billion of military aid to Israel, with more in the pipeline.
The Socialist Party has been fighting for the trade unions – organising over 6 million workers in Britain – to take their place centre stage in the anti-war movement. It could mobilise more members to attend mass demos, and coordinate workers’ sanctions to stop arms and supplies reaching the Israeli military. What is to stop this action being linked up by further workers’ action internationally, such as that of the Barcelona dockers and Belgian transport workers unions who have refused to handle military goods destined for Israel?
Workers organise
It is the threat of workers getting organised and fighting back that terrifies the capitalist world leaders. The pro-capitalist leaders in the Middle East are terrified of mass popular movements developing, demanding an end to poverty and inequality, and with it their power. It is a mass movement of workers and poor people, democratically organised and fighting for socialist change, in Palestine and across the region, that can point the way forward to an end to war and national oppression.
The Socialist Party is fighting for:
- End the siege – for the permanent withdrawal of the Israeli military from the occupied territories
- For a mass struggle of the Palestinians, under their own democratic control, to fight for liberation
- For the building of independent workers’ parties in Palestine and Israel and links between them
- For an independent, socialist Palestinian state, alongside a socialist Israel, with guaranteed rights for all minorities, as part of the struggle for a socialist Middle East
- No trust in the capitalist politicians, internationally or in Britain. Fight to build a workers’ party in Britain that fights for socialism and internationalism
