A Misunderstanding

A Misunderstanding

The events in Gaza have sparked a wave of international solidarity in an unusual but all the more welcome way.
It is uncommon that this solidarity surpasses familiar circles and involves people from various backgrounds and viewpoints.
This is, of course, commendable per se.
It must be said that every expression of solidarity for an oppressed people is important – ranging from verbal declarations of support to active protests.
Nevertheless, a fundamental misunderstanding seems to exist among many regarding how imperialist states and their conflicts operate, such as the one in occupied Palestine.

On social networks and beyond, since the beginning of the current escalation, there have been frequent calls to boycott
companies that finance Israel, such as Starbucks or McDonald’s.
TikTok filters, with proceeds supposedly donated to “save Gaza,” have become among the most used filters on the app.
Here I see a fundamental misunderstanding, which is similarly observable in environmental debates.
Targeted interference with the profits of large corporations to redirect their accumulation tactics.
Similar to consumer-critical tactics in the fight against climate change, such approaches are fundamentally flawed in understanding capitalist production.

Base and Superstructure

The Western support for Israel is not primarily based on a sense of historical responsibility for the safety of Jewish people, nor on ‘Zionist conspiracies’ by governments, as ultraright groups here in Germany tend to interpret.

Since its founding, Israel, like Taiwan a few thousand kilometers away, has served as a stationary aircraft carrier for the capitalist interests of Western corporations and their supported governments in the region.
Since its establishment, Israel has been the foothold of capitalist interests of the Western-imperialist bloc in the Middle East, which is characterized by its Zionist nature as an active colonial project against the Palestinian indigenous population.
Israel’s imperialist foundation makes the need for capital accumulation inevitable; concretely, this means that Israeli corporations, beyond their state-supporting role within the Zionist state, rely on expansion into Palestine to secure profits.

This does not make Israel inherently worse than its imperialist counterparts elsewhere in the capitalist world – like any other imperialist country, Israel’s core task as a (still) bourgeois state is to secure and protect the capital interests of its own and allied corporations.
As a bourgeois state, protecting property relations—that is, the ownership of the means of production by the capitalist class—is fundamental — as enshrined in our Basic Law, for example, Article 14:1 GG.

While bombs rain down on Gaza, Israel’s capitalistic pursuits continue as usual—somehow, it has to be profitable:
Already on October 30th, the occupying state granted 12 licenses to 6 multinational and Israeli oil and gas companies, including the British monopoly BP and the Italian energy giant Eni, allowing them to explore further oil sources in the newly occupied Gaza.
Israel’s total reserves of oil and gas were estimated at an impressive 524 billion USD in 2019—of course, according to UN reports, completely illegal, as Palestinians have rights to these reserves, but when has capital ever respected the UN?
And still, Israel does this not because it is especially ‘evil,’ but because it must do so as a capitalist state.
Israel’s task is to ensure the profits of imperialist bloc corporations—if they didn’t, economic downturns, a hollow state budget, or even complete isolation could occur—this can be simply proven:
Would Israel, if it were a socialist state with nationalized industry, care at all? It is in Israel’s material nature to do what it is doing now: expand, kill, exploit—just as its big brother in the region has done many times before.

Drops in a Hot Pan

Calls such as “Defund Israel” or “Boycott Israel,” petitions, and initiatives to contact Bundestag representatives are less like drops in a boiling pot—they are more like petitions to winter not to come, or calls to cells not to divide.
The idea that changing consumption habits, boycotts, and petitions can influence a fundamentally systemic material problem is a misconception that diverts from the real capitalist roots of this war.
You do not change the base by manipulating the superstructure.
The nature of a capitalist state is to secure and protect the capital interests of its corporations, often through violence—see September 1, 1939; March 20, 2003; March 19, 2011, etc. The only way to stop the consequences of this nature is to change it—alternative modes of production, property relations, and a state representing the working class, not capital.
The working class in Israel, however, is particularly divided by the racist-Zionist alliance between the state and capital.
Jewish-Israeli workers earn on average 35% more than Palestinian workers with Israeli passports, and Israel hosts a large number of precarious guest workers who have been brought in since the Second Intifada to replace Palestinian workers.
State founder Ben-Gurion stated:
“We must appeal to the local elements of Eastern Jews, (…) whose standard of living and demands are lower than those of European workers, and who can then successfully compete with Arabs.”
Competitive by settling Arabs who can be exploited more easily; then stealing their land, occupying it for 75 years, killing, and leaving no other option but working for less pay, fewer rights, and no peace for the occupier—capitalist genius!

What Can Be Done?

As an ethnoreligious state, Israel must secure a Jewish majority in the Promised Land, which involves sharp class divisions.
Is it therefore possible for Jewish and Palestinian workers to fight united as a class?
It would be easy for this article to say that only class consciousness is needed, and once achieved, the whole problem would be solved: solidarity of workers on both sides, and the Red Front etc.
And while that is fundamentally correct, the situation in Israel is even more complex:
Unlike other bourgeois societies, Israel has not developed a traditional trade union movement; today, Israel only has a “trade union” that does not even deserve that name; in the Histadrut, Arab workers in Israel are not even allowed to join—another tool of class division.
Furthermore, Zionism, which 82% of Israelis consider important (survey: Israelnet, 2016), naturally creates problems because it is a chauvinist ideology fundamentally dividing classes.
Under Netanyahu’s far-right government, the most reactionary so far, class conflicts have intensified both vertically within Israel and horizontally between Palestinians and Israelis.

The attack by Islamist Hamas was a synthesis of 75 years of oppression, murder, and displacement of Palestinians, and the failure of progressive Palestinian organizations to establish a political monopoly—note that progressive forces like Ghassan Kanafani have been systematically murdered by Israel.
This oppression is directly part of the ideological superstructure, in Marx’s terms, which is reproduced through pro-Zionist media in Israel and the rest of the ‘free world,’ and builds upon Israel’s uniquely contradictory material base.
Every person between Jordan and the Mediterranean can only be truly free if their respective state’s interests are not based on capital accumulation and expansion, nor on Sharia law.
Mao once said that a war can only be justified if its end is more just than its beginning—Is the Israeli goal just? And Hamas’s?

Are you criticizing the table manners of a starving person?