[....] On May 14 Israelis marked the 76th anniversary of Israel’s declaration of Independence.Prior to World War II, most Jews were not supporters of creating a majority Jewish state in Palestine, then under British colonial rule. But that changed in the wake of the Holocaust, in which the Nazis murdered 6 million Jews, 40% of the Jews in the world. There are still fewer Jews in the world today, than at the start of that war.Washington and other imperialist powers turned away Jews fleeing the Nazis and sent them back to Europe, many to their deaths. After the war, hundreds of thousands languished in “displaced person” camps, still largely denied entry to the U.S., Canada, the U.K. and beyond. Jews fought to create Israel and make it a refuge from Jew-hatred. The Jewish population of Palestine grew from 56,000 in 1919 to 680,000 by May 1948.Zionist leaders had agreed to a United Nations proposed partition of Palestine into two states: one with a Jewish majority and one with an Arab majority.But the semifeudal and capitalist Arab leadership in Palestine and neighboring countries rejected the plan. Instead, they launched a war to destroy the new Jewish state and expel the Jews. Notorious Jew-hater Amin al-Husseini, the scion of a land-owning family and Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, played a prominent role in that war. Husseini organized anti-Jewish pogroms in Palestine as far back as 1920 and then collaborated with the Nazis during World War II.Israel defeated the Arab armies and consolidated a capitalist state with all the contradictions that entails. Competing bourgeois regimes in neighboring Egypt, Jordan and Syria blocked any moves toward an independent Palestinian state in the areas they controlled.Hamas — and its backers in Tehran — are the continuators of Husseini and other Islamist forces that want to complete the Nazis’ “Final Solution” of exterminating the Jews.Defense of Israel’s right to exist as a refuge for Jews is based on that history and the reality of Jew-hatred in the imperialist epoch.
[....] What looms now isn’t a new Cold War but the growing inevitability of new, and more threatening, “hot” wars around the world.From Romania to Bulgaria, the capitalist rulers are taking steps to line up with Washington. Those of Sweden and Finland dropped their professed neutrality to join NATO. The Polish rulers are negotiating to host U.S. nuclear weapons. Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Turkey all have U.S. tactical nuclear weapons based on their soil.
At the same time, as Barnes said in his 2022 statement, “Putin’s efforts to excuse his bloodthirsty invasion of Ukraine on grounds of moves by Washington and other NATO governments are as cynical as they are false. A sovereign and independent Ukraine poses no military threat to Russia of any kind.”
The threat to humanity of escalating conflicts leading to another world war where heavily armed nuclear powers face off against each other poses the need to build a leadership that can mobilize working people in their millions to take political power from the capitalist warmakers into our own hands.
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