At the time of writing, a ceasefire deal has finally been agreed to between Hamas and the Israeli government. This in and of itself is welcome of course, and frankly the deal is much better for Hamas than it is for Israel. Israeli journalist Yossi Yehoshua asserts “There’s no need to sugarcoat the reality: the emerging cease-fire and hostage release deal is bad for Israel, but it has no choice but to accept it.”
Anyone who has paid the slightest attention to Israel’s historic behaviour will be holding their breath now, waiting for Israel’s pre-ceasefire indiscriminate slaughter, and probable attempts to undermine the deal and blame the Palestinian resistance for any failure. We’re all too aware that this positive moment may be brief, and the horror may resume. That said, this is the first real spark of hope many Palestinians have felt in a long time and we, as a solidarity movement, ought to fan that spark into a push for more: For a ceasefire, an end to the blockade of Gaza, and an end to the occupation itself.
The USA’s Ruling Class is Divided on Tactics Alone
It is becoming clear with each new update that despite Democratic Party President Joe Biden’s claims of victory, that it was President-Elect Donald Trump and his envoy Steve Witkoff who were the deciding factors in the successful ceasefire deal.
After a single meeting with Israeli leaders, Team Trump secured what the Democratic Party had failed to achieve since 2023. According to Haaretz, “Witkoff has forced Israel to accept a plan that Netanyahu had repeatedly rejected over the past half year.” This reality lays bare what we have known all along, but has been obscured by US politicians and the news media that has uncritically shared their words: the US state has always had the power to force Israel’s hand and stop the genocide. On the contrary, they have funded it, while claiming that Hamas was rejecting a ceasefire deal. We know that this is not true – the Qatar-brokered ceasefire deal is largely the same as Qatar’s proposals in early 2024 that were accepted by Hamas but rejected by Netanyahu.
Not only is this surely deeply humiliating for the US Democratic Party, but it also has the secondary effect of shifting the face of the genocide in Palestine from USA writ large, to the Democratic Party specifically, painting that party as the bloodthirsty party of war. Meanwhile Trump and his far-right allies can now position themselves as an America-first, anti-war alternative to Biden and the Democrats.
We, as socialists, ought to feel bolstered by our principles now, after enduring no end of finger-wagging from Democratic Party cheerleaders, both homegrown and abroad, as we critiqued the Democratic Party-sponsored genocide and were told how much worse life would be for Palestinians if the US’ head of state wore a red tie rather than blue. Not for the sake of being smug, or relishing a Trump presidency, but as a reminder that the logic of capitalism and imperialism followed by the Democratic Party has both visited mass slaughter upon Palestinians and bolstered the North American far right. Reality is loud and clear: if you are anti-war, you must also be anti-capitalist, and opposed to the whole US ruling class.
Not Peace, but Alternative Imperialist Strategy
The notion that Trump is a force for peace is nonsense, of course. Trump is no less committed to the brutal, extractive imperialism of the US Empire than the Democrats. In recent years, he has made a public show of desire to use US weapons as a bargaining chip in Ukraine and Palestine, not committing to ceasing any arms shipments but simply turning the faucet off if the US’ allies don’t do what he says. In the meantime, Trump and the Republican Party more broadly continue to ramp up the new Cold War scaremongering with China, engaging in everything from military alliance deals to banning TikTok. For us in the Pacific this likely means escalating militarism in the South China Sea and heightened Australian military investment.
War is a racket, but it’s not necessarily a windfall for all the ruling class. The US can support its watchdog state in the Middle East and let Israel slaughter indiscriminately, and weapons manufactures and tech companies will make a killing. The social, religious and racial tensions that arise from war can be inflamed to divide the working class, domestically and abroad, for the benefit of capitalists who may otherwise be threatened by a unified front of workers. But all the labour hours and capital that is poured into these products of death is a mass of resources that explodes halfway across the world, and all the US has to show for it is a greater capacity for warfare and a struggling imperial outpost in the Levant.
The Path Ahead
It may feel a bit trite, but the old adage ‘socialism or barbarism’ is certainly truer than ever. Our side, the international working class, desperately needs to expand our capacity and boundaries of influence, or the ruling class and their geopolitical agendas will make our decisions for us – and send us deeper into war and climate crisis. Socialism or barbarism, true democracy or imperialism, liberation or war. While the choice is obvious, the path there is messy and difficult, but we know where it begins: national liberation for Palestine and the shrugging off of the settler-colonial displacement project of Israel, and its allied US presence in the Middle East. A single democratic state with equal rights for all its people in the region of historic Palestine. It will likely be ugly at first, with distrust and a legacy of racism and land theft to contend with, but it will be less ugly than imperialist genocide.
A free Palestine, alongside the working class of Arab and other Middle Eastern peoples that smash the chains of their respective theocratic, warring and capitalist rulers is the next step on the path to the end of mass slaughter campaigns, and the self-rule of the working class the world over.
Image Credit: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Mark McGuire (CC BY 3.0 NZ)
