Monday, July 21, 2014

"The truth must not only be the truth; it must be told and acted upon"

I wanted to share this post from a comrade on Facebook.

While reading the comments and "explanations" for why Israel "had to" bomb the Al-Aqsa hospital in Deir al-Balah, Gaza, I'm reminded of Baruch Spinoza and the enduring value of the practical conclusions of this 17th-century worker-fighter for human progress: no matter what happens to one-self in life, one needs to understand beyond one-self to come to grips with life.
To do that today, one has to step back a bit and see what is happening with a longer-range sense of history, with the political approach of a citizen of the world, of a working-class internationalist. 
 The borders; the states; the national divisions and oppressive class relationships institutionalized by the competing (and sometimes "allied") "victors" coming out of the mass slaughters of World War I and World War II - that whole imperialist-imposed order is unraveling as we speak, from the battlefields of Iraq to the mines of Turkey, from a Kurdistan in becoming to the still-not-extinguished popular fight in Syria.

No matter what the ruling class of Israel - or any other ruling class or capitalist force in the broader region or on Earth - does today to close democratic and political space, working people will continue to meet each other, they will share experiences with each other and over time converge in life and political organization and thinking.

 
The truth must not only be the truth; it must be told and acted upon. We have to offer ourselves as working people a way forward; a political road in common that will transcend any border they put in our way. The fight for socialist revolution and a democratic and secular Palestine is not a matter of making an abstract "choice" among many others, it can not be postponed; it is a matter of offering ourselves the necessary conditions for freedom and life before un-ending horror and drawn-out death.
Leon Trotsky was right in 1940: the salvation of the Jewish people - AND the Palestinian people - lies in the victory of the world socialist revolution.
Israel is a PART of this changing world; that is a social fact there is no turning back from, and its ruling class will not escape the coming mass challenges to its power from "the inside", by workers and poor farmers who are Jewish, Arab, Russian, Eritrean; "native-born" or "immigrant". For that, there is NO wall that will ever "work".
Its not 1948, 1967 nor 1973 anymore; no Iron Dome nor "permanent military State" can change that. The world is getting smaller and the prospects for a politically independent (from any kind of exploiters) working-class course of action are broadening, propelled forward by the very workings and inevitable consequences of the capitalist world economy.
This massively imposed suffering for the people of Gaza is NOT about Hamas, Fatah nor any other - in historical terms, momentary - misleadership or political obstacles, whose bourgeois corruption and thugishness can not offer the Palestinian people (nor any other people) a unifying perspective nor peace, land and bread. 
Much more is at stake for the only class that produces all wealth and guards the common achievements of human culture, the international class whose collective labor and social transformation of nature offers a tomorrow, if that word is to have any future meaning at all.
No matter how many "targeted assassinations", invasions and bombs they rain down periodically upon the people of Gaza (or anywhere else); no matter how much suffering, hunger or misery they directly or indirectly inflict on the Palestinian people, the capitalist ruling class of Israel will not break the will to fight of the Palestinian people for land and dignity. That is also a fact, an inescapable historical, political and moral fact.
There is no "security" nor "peace" for the Jewish people (most of whom live outside of Israel) as long as the rule of Capital dominates the world; a historically outmoded system of economic and social (dis)organization that inevitably - if its not conquered in time by the united and conscious action of working people internationally - will once again unleash fascism on a mass scale as a means to survive, targeting the Jewish people once again...
The ruling class of Israel can not do otherwise than what they are doing today. They can not offer the working people of Israel (nor of Gaza and the West Bank) a real and livable future. They can not offer anything else than war and the mentality of the besieged. And what they "offer" the population of Gaza today is a glimpse of what they will offer anyone resisting their rule inside of Israel itself. 

https://www.facebook.com/ernesto.oleinik?hc_location=timeline

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