Some Americans try to fit their understanding of Israel and Palestine into left-wing racial identity politics. More traditional leftists, like Britain’s Socialist Workers Party, Palestinian academics, and some Levantine revolutionaries, insist it’s about ‘imperialism’:
‘It is important to stress the primary role of imperialism in this analysis, which means rejecting explanations that emphasize the supposed power of a “Zionist lobby,” or, worse, a “Jewish lobby.”’ – International Socialism 181, page 45.
“Genocide served as an existential mechanism for capital as it coalesced into Western imperialist capital…Israel is the latest incarnation of these Western capitalist genocidaires.” – Georges Abdallah.
There are also ‘ultra-leftists’ who try to make it about the class struggle. I’ll call them “ultras.”
Months after The Gray Zone had already demolished the October 7th rape hoax, I heard an ultra uncritically repeat this genocidal Zionist lie.
Another long-standing ultra mate sent me two attempts to hammer the square peg of Palestine into the round hole of Marxism: “Gaza: An Extreme Militarization of the Class War,” (henceforth, GAEM) https://libcom.org/article/gaza-extreme-militarization-class-war and “Gaza 2024; TC and Minassian” (GTAM).
The ultra approach immediately leads to easily falsifiable absurdities; GAEM claims that Hamas is Israel’s sub-contractor for managing part of the proletariat, apparently unaware of the mass murder of the Hamas police force by the IDF. Israel is not an expression of capital, or imperialism. It is about racial supremacy – but not the kind with which the American left is obsessed. It’s not about ‘whiteness.’
While reading GAEM, I tempered my contempt by reminding myself that, a long time ago, I belonged to an ultra group. It once produced a poster “The Iran-Iraq war – a Jihad for Capitalism.” In fact, this war was an attack, which killed a million people, on the population and government of Iran, by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, acting for US imperialism. The same firm today has a leaflet entitled “Iranian workers raise the banner of class war.”
In fact, the banners you can see today in Iran are about the Epstein class. In America itself, on the right, and even on the left, delusions are collapsing. Military men are openly saying Israel controls their government. There are mutinies in the US forces, but these aren’t like the mutinies of world war one. They are compatible with patriotism, and it would be dumb to talk to mutineers in the language of ultra-leftism. Emphasizing that they’re being sent to die for Israel would be more effective.
Half the world’s Jews live in Israel. Over ninety percent of them believe there are no innocents in Gaza:
https://mondoweiss.net/2025/07/poll-overwhelming-majority-of-jewish-israelis-share-genocidal-belief-there-are-no-innocent-people-in-gaza.
Most of the Jewish adults in the ‘diaspora’ identify with Israel. The largest section is in the USA:
https://www.jewishelectorateinstitute.org/u-s-jews-identify-as-both-pro-israel-critical-of-its-govt. American Jews tend to be liberal Zionists. The Israeli ones are more honest. Most synagogues are pro-Israel.
The holocaust in West Asia is caused by the power of world Jewry. This is not a comfortable conclusion, partly for obvious historical reasons, and also, you can be fired, or even imprisoned, for less — which only reinforces my point.
An Israeli embassy spokeswoman told Americans they will be spied on if they criticise Israel:
People have been jailed for protected speech. Examples include Rümeysa Öztürk and Mahmoud Khalil, who was imprisoned for a month in Louisiana, while his wife gave birth in New York, for saying “Up with Hamas.” But
- There is no evidence that he ever said “Up with Hamas”
- It is not illegal to say “Up with Hamas.”
There is a bill before Congress ordering twenty years jail and a million dollars fine for advocating a boycott of Israel. The USA celebrated its 250th anniversary by throwing the First Amendment overboard, where it joined Rebekah Vardy’s phone, and Marxism, in Davy Jones’ Locker.
It couldn’t be clearer if they erected a neon sign between Congress and the White House bearing the words “Zionist Occupation Government.”
The class analysis doesn’t start by asking “what is the most parsimonious description of the known data?” What do I mean by this?
The simplest explanation of the concept “parsimonious” is “simplest.” A simple example is why we say the earth orbits the sun, rather than the other way round. If we describe the data as “the sun orbits the earth,” we have to say the other planets follow strange loopy patterns, whereas with the earth orbiting the sun, they describe simple ellipses. You CAN say the sun goes round the earth, and you CAN say the American ruling class is encouraging antisemitic conspiracy theories by pretending to serve Jewish power, in order to distract us from understanding imperialism.
The most parsimonious explanation of the West’s support for the genocide in Palestine and Lebanon is not that it just happens to be profitable to commit genocide in this small part of the capitalist world, and not in the rest of it. A simpler explanation is that this is where Israel is, and the West obeys Israel.
GAEM imagines capital “ethnicizing proletarians”: ‘Israel has managed to produce a situation seen nowhere else in the world: the integration of an ethnicized—“Jewish”—proletariat into the state, against the “Arab” part of the proletariat, also ethnicized.’
GTAM is a response to GAEM. It makes the same mistakes as the article it ostensibly criticises:
“The current “war” corresponds in reality to an extreme militarization of the class war… The land does not belong to the people [proletariat], anywhere in the world.”
So, from the point of view of the people [proletariat], the Nakba [ethnic cleansing] never happened.
No, genocide is about race, not class. The reason Jews ethnicize Palestinians is because, by exterminating the untermenschen, they get more lebensraum. The reason “capital” supports the Jews is not because it’s particularly profitable at this moment to revive the genocide of capitalism’s rosy dawn, but because we, too, are living inside Jewish supremacy, and the sooner we replace fantasies with cold reality, the sooner we can escape.