EDITORIAL
Imperialist Domination Produces War, Death, and Destruction

Oct 16, 2023

Another barbaric war broke out in the Middle East, this time engulfing Israel and Gaza. The U.S. government and news media blame the Palestinian group, Hamas, for setting off this war.

Yes, Hamas fighters carried out a murderous rampage, killing over a thousand Israelis and wounding thousands more. This is blind violence, and it has to be condemned. But the U.S. is in no position to condemn this violence. Its hands are not clean.

The Israeli military’s response to this rampage explains how we got here. For the Israeli military launched a war against the entire Gaza population of more than two million people, half of whom are children. The Israeli government cut off all water, electricity, gas, food, and medical supplies to the Gaza Strip, condemning countless people to sickness, starvation, and death. Warplanes have been dropping thousands of bombs every day on Gaza, killing thousands and turning entire neighborhoods into rubble. And while the Israeli army masses a heavily equipped army of 300,000 troops along the border, it has ordered all Palestinians living in the north of Gaza to move to the south, provoking a mass panic, exodus and certainly more death.

Gaza is a tiny territory, half the size of Chicago. It is one of the most densely populated areas of land on Earth. Most people are refugees, who fled other wars and conflicts. They are extremely poor. And they are already trapped, completely surrounded by troops, guards, fences, walls, and war ships. Gaza is an open-air prison that has been periodically bombed and invaded in war after war.

The Israeli military now proposes to invade—this means urban warfare, soldiers fighting street to street, house to house, and much more death and destruction. And what will that produce? Ethnic cleansing? This will bring more wars, endless wars. What it will not bring is more protection or security for the various peoples—obviously not the Palestinians, but certainly not the Israelis either.

Israel, the U.S., and the rest of the big powers denounce Hamas for terrorism. But what these big powers carry out against the Palestinian population is unspeakable terror and violence from one of the biggest, most advanced, and heavily equipped militaries in the world.

Biden, the U.S. government, and the U.S. military say their support of Israel is the support of the Jewish people. That is a lie. The U.S. supports the state of Israel for one reason: the Israeli state is U.S. imperialism’s cop in the Middle East, a region rich in oil resources, which means tremendous profits and wealth for U.S. oil companies, financiers, military contractors, the capitalist class as a whole.

In order to safeguard those profits and wealth, the U.S. and the other big powers have divided the different peoples and ethnic groups of the region against each other. Divide and rule is how the U.S. and the other imperialist powers have always imposed their domination. Those divisions have produced nationalist and religious fundamentalism, and many, many wars: Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and all the wars between Israel and the Palestinians. For the Israeli population, that means being on the front line, kill or be killed, over and over again.

All the peoples of the Middle East could live together in peace, despite all their differences, ethnic or religious. That can only be brought about when the working class and poor of all the different countries in the Middle East rise up and overthrow their own rotten rulers, religious fanatics and parasites who oppress and divide them. This will allow them to get rid of the system that is causing the worsening cycle of wars and ethnic conflicts: capitalism and imperialism. And in so doing they will help the mighty working classes in the big imperialist countries to do the same.

Peace is possible only when the working class takes power from that tiny capitalist minority that runs society today, in order to run society in the interests of the majority.