by Yorgos Mitralias

More than at any time in the 75 years of the State of Israel’s existence, these days we have witnessed the spectacular yet tragic collapse of the Zionist movement’s great promise to the persecuted Jewish people… that only a Jewish state in Palestine would be able to bring them the security and peace they have been deprived of for centuries! Today, Zionism’s patent failure to deliver on its promise is more evident than ever, as it is now generally accepted that the Jewish diaspora around the world may still be subject to anti-Semitism (once again on the rise), but nevertheless lives in far greater security and peace than the Jewish population in Israel. Clearly, the most dangerous place in the world for a Jew today is… Israel!.…

Alas, the last people to admit this are Israel’s current leaders, who are leading their country more than any Hamas, Jihad or Hezbollah to catastrophe. Racist to the extreme, chauvinistic, unconditional supporters of Greater Israel, obscurantists and professional warmongers, the various far-right politicians who make up the Israeli government have no other project than to continue worsening the crisis, constantly nibbling away at Palestinian land, oppressing and humiliating the Palestinian people to the extreme. Because their political survival – and not only that – demands it. Because only war-mongering and nationalist hysteria can enable their leader, the infamous Bibi Netanyahu, to relieve the suffocating pressure exerted on him for a year (!) by the hundreds of thousands of Israeli citizens who have been demonstrating twice a week (!), demanding his impeachment, trial and condemnation for both his incredible corruption and his attempt to demolish the country’s democratic institutions. Seventy-five years on, the great (Jewish) Albert Einstein’s public denunciation of Mr. Netanyahu’s political masterminds and ancestors as “fascists”, “racists” and “terrorists” who can only do great harm to the Jewish people is more useful and topical than ever… (1)

So, if we can expect nothing remotely promising from Israel’s leaders, but also from their official opposition, we can also harbor no democratic or progressive illusions whatsoever about Hamas, Hezbollah and their “protecting power”, the Iran of the obscurantist and ultra-repressive Ayatollah regime. And, of course, we can expect nothing good from Western leaders, who are only capable of turning a blind eye to Israeli crimes in order to give unconditional support to Netanyahu and describe Hamas fighters as “terrorists”. The (provisional?) conclusion is therefore inevitably pessimistic: the resistance, the more than just struggle of the Palestinian people against both their enemies and their “friends”, has yet to find a political expression capable of inspiring and mobilizing the Arab masses, including the Palestinian people, in the way that socialism and then pan-Arabism did in the past, at least in part.

Since it is on the ruins of the emancipatory socialist and communist message that the reactionary obscurantisms, both religious and neo-liberal, that plague humanity today are flourishing, it is clear that the beginning of a way out of the current impasse must and can be sought through the reinvention of an anti-imperialist movement for national and social liberation, based on the internationalist solidarity of “those from below”. A “reinvention” that concerns us all directly, including in our own country. After all, given Israel’s enormous military superiority and the ongoing and increasingly scandalous betrayal of the Palestinian cause by all the otherwise so authoritarian and undemocratic Arab regimes, the only way to prevent the indefinite continuation of the mutual massacres of Palestinians and Jewish Israelis is through their militant solidarity and common struggle against their common enemies. The task looks and is indeed difficult. But it is the only realistic option…

Note

1. https://www.cadtm.org/When-Einstein-called-fascists-those-who-rule-Israel-for-the-last-44-years