By FLORENCE OPPEN
The U.S. has seen a growing mass movement, led by the Palestinian diaspora and the youth, to stop Israel’s acts of genocide against the Palestinian people. One of the major achievements of this movement is to articulate the need to stand in unconditional solidarity with the Palestinian resistance, opposing the U.S. and other Western imperialist states’ measures to criminalize the movement. We continue to refuse to “condemn” the actions of the resistance and we defend the right of Palestinians to obtain military aid and support from wherever they can get it—including Iran, Yemen, or Russia.
Within the Palestine solidarity movement, however, a debate is emerging on how to build a broad international movement that can defeat Israel, stop the unbearable genocide, and ensure the realization of a “Free Palestine from the River to the Sea.”
In “The Hundred Years War on Palestine” (2020), Palestinian historian Rashid Khalidi stated that the new wave of the liberation movement must learn some lessons from the past decades of struggle: “Neither dependence on U.S. mediation in fruitless negotiations of the Abbas era nor a nominal strategy of armed resistance has advanced Palestinian national aims over the past few decades. Nor is there much for Palestinians to expect from Arab regimes like those of Egypt and Jordan, which today have no shame in signing massive deals with Israel, or Saudi Arabia and the UAE, which have purchased Israeli weapons and security systems through American cut-outs that only thinly disguise their origins.”
Despite the abandonment of real solidarity with the Palestinians by these regional bourgeois regimes, the Palestinian masses often invoke the “Axis of Resistance” as a strategic ally. This formula refers to the constellation of several political forces—the Shiite theocratic dictatorship in Iran, the Hezbollah forces based in Southern Lebanon, the Zaydi-Shiite Houthi forces in Yemen, and to a lesser extent, the Iran-backed forces operating in Iraq and Syria.
Western imperialist powers want to decentralize and delegitimize the Palestinian resistance forces by reducing them in their statements to being mere puppets of Iran. They do so to better frame their involvement in the ongoing genocide as a conflict between liberal democratic regimes (including Israel) and autocratic ones (targeting Iran), thus covering up their own geopolitical interests in backing the Zionist state.
In a similar way, a sector of the U.S. left celebrates Iran as a center of selfless anti-Zionist resistance and as the leading force controlling the constellation of forces of the Axis. This view hides the regional interests of Iran and its imperialist backers in the region, which in the last instance explain its inaction. It also hides the fact that the active militias (Lebanon, Yemen) come out of indigenous and autonomous processes of popular organizing and are not following Iran’s directions.
So far, all military engagements have been indirect and sideways by Hezbollah and the Houthis. While these actions have raised the need for regional military solidarity, none have really managed to deter Israel’s escalation and genocidal actions. Despite the many declarations from the Iranian regime of its desire to crush Israel and avenge the Palestinian people, there has been little to nothing in terms of a direct military confrontation.
Several factors are pulling Iran away from any direct confrontation with Israel and the U.S.—its growing relations with imperialist powers such as Russia and China, its hopes to eventually achieve some sort of detente with the U.S., and Iran’s own attempts to achieve an area of influence in the region.
Russian imperialism currently balances its stance in the conflict by verbally advocating a two-state solution while indirectly supporting Israel through oil sales and backing the normalization of the Zionist entity in the region. The Ukraine War has solidified the partnership of Iran and Russia, with Iran supplying military support to Russia in return for advanced military technology. Thus, Putin aims to prevent Iran from engaging in a resource-draining war in the Middle East that will hamper its own war efforts.
China’s primary goal in the Middle East is to secure its economic interests, particularly in energy and trade. To achieve this, it seeks to maintain good relations with all parties in the region, including Iran, Israel, and the Arab states. China’s growing economic ties with Iran and Israel discourage direct military confrontation between the two nations.
While China has expressed support for a “two-state solution” in Palestine, its primary focus remains on economic stability and preventing any escalation that could disrupt its business interests. It bets on the diplomatic weapon to show ambiguous support for the Palestinian resistance while actively pressuring Iran, with which it signed an economic cooperation agreement in 2021, not to enter into direct war with Israel. The objective of Chinese imperialism is not Palestinian liberation but, above all, to expand its influence in the region and challenge U.S. dominance.
Any hope for full-blown support for the Palestinian resistance does not lie in appealing to reactionary regimes, despite their occasional “progressive” rhetoric, but in the development of a mass popular insurrection in the region that can link up with and expand the ongoing resistance efforts.
The successive waves of the “Arab Spring”—in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria, and Yemen in 2011, and later in Algeria, Sudan, and Iran—showed the power that mass movements can have, and also the pressing need to have a political leadership to align demands and strategy. These are the combined forces that can better confront the capitulatory policy of the current regional governments toward Israel and take to the streets to fight for their cause.
The Palestinian liberation movement has a lot to win by refusing to subordinate support for the mass struggles of the region to maintaining political alliances with the region’s ruling classes and their regimes. These regimes starve and oppress their own people as well as Palestinians within their borders. As Joseph Daher, a Swiss-Syrian socialist activist, explains, “Those workers and peasants [who participated in the Arab Spring] remember their forbearers’ fight against colonialism, confront imperialist powers’ that support the regimes that oppress them, identify with the struggle of the Palestinians, and therefore see their own battle for democracy and equality as bound up with its victory. That’s why there is a dialectical relationship between the struggles; when Palestinians fight it triggers the regional movement for liberation, and the regional movement feeds back into the one in occupied Palestine.”
The emergence in the Middle East of a multi-ethnic mass movement, of a majority proletarian and poor peasant composition, would set the conditions for the liberation of Palestine. Next to the struggle of the Palestinian people, combined with an uprising by the masses of the region, U.S. workers and youth are a third component of the strategy for a Free Palestine. The widespread protests against U.S. complicity in the genocide should coalesce into coordinated mass anti-imperialist mobilizations with clear demands and a strategy to win. Those in the U.S. who stand in solidarity with Palestine must fight to immediately end all U.S. aid to Israel, while rigorously opposing the growing criminalization of the Palestinian resistance and also the calls for the U.S. to back any Israeli attack on Iran.
End Israeli genocide in Gaza! For a free, democratic, and secular Palestine! Hands off Iran! For a socialist federation of the Middle East!
Photo: Hezbollah, the Lebanese group, holds training exercises in May 2023 to demonstrate its readiness to confront Israel. (Hassan Ammar / AP)