The Hamas incursion on October 7, 2023 into Israeli kibbutzim neighbouring the Gaza Strip was, notwithstanding the conjectures regarding the unpreparedness of the Israeli secret services in terms of the necessary precautions, an extremely favourable opportunity to achieve the historic Zionist project of Greater Israel, which all Israeli governments that have been hitherto alternating in power have always pursued in a more or less covert manner. Netanyahu's government is certainly not taking a different stance.

On 7 October alone, the Tel Aviv army embarked on a large-scale and long-lasting reprisal in which, according to the Netanyahu government's intentions, Hamas and its military and political wings would be eliminated, and the civilian population of the Gaza Strip, which had “chozen” to be governed by Hamas, would be taught a “lesson” they would never forget…

At first, it might have seemed, as announced, that this was a military operation whose main objective was to rescue more than 200 hostages captured by Hamas and taken to the Gaza Strip, while at the same time responding very strongly to Hamas. The “official” targets of the Israeli military operation in Gaza were Hamas leaders and militiamen; but in reality – as has always been the case since the Six-Day War (i.e. the Third Arab-Israeli War) of 1967 – Israel precisely because Palestinian militiamen lived and live in close contact with the civilian population (and it could not be otherwise, given the high population density in the ever-shrinking square kilometres of territory on which Palestinians have been forced to live from one war to the next), never made much of a difference between armed militiamen and the civilian population, whether the reprisals were carried out directly by Tel Aviv or at the hands of other executioners, as in the case of the Amman (Jordan) massacre in September 1970, the Tall al-Zaatar camp massacre (Lebanon) in 1976, and the Sabra and Shatila massacre (Lebanon) in 1982, not to mention the subsequent intifadas. However, it is a mistake to believe that only Israel or the Arab regimes in Jordan, Lebanon or Syria are responsible for the massacres of Palestinians.

In the historical reality of the situation that arose in the immediate aftermath of the second world imperialist war, we are witnessing that the great “victorious” powers hold in their hands the fate not only of Europe, but of the whole world, and in particular of the turbulent Middle East. First England and France, then the United States – with the Soviet Union looking on – have sunk their claws into these vast territories, rich in precious oil and strategically important for trade routes with the East. Therefore, in everything that has taken place, is taking place and will take place in ancient Palestine and throughout the Middle East, the interests not only of the regional powers (Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the various Arab regimes, not excluding Turkey) but above all the great world powers will be constantly involved. It is a well-known fact that England, once a pivotal world power, especially in the Far East and the Middle East, has been replaced by the United States of America as a world power capable of being present simultaneously on all continents. There is therefore no geopolitical zone of the world, whether large or small, in which Washington does not have interests that it intends to assert.

The very fact that Washington has been investing billions and billions of dollars in Israel for decades to act as “America's” gendarme in the Middle East (over time it has become the gendarme of “the West”), and providing it with economic, political, diplomatic and military support on a global level, makes Washington the main culprit for all the actions that the Israeli bourgeoisie has done, is doing and plans to do. Sure, in the decades that have passed since the end of the second world imperialist conflict, the relations between the various powers that emerged from it as winners and losers have been changed, but not yet so profoundly as to present the mere germ of the formation of the camps of the next imperialist war. The emergence of economic powers capable of driving American capitalism into straits in a competitive war that knows no bounds (such as China, Germany and Japan, to name but a few economies whose increasingly intense competition Washington rightly fears, not to mention the running sore that is, from the historical point of view, Russia, particularly due to its nuclear power), has in some respects forced Washington to map out its economic-military interventions much more prudently than before: this forced it to delegate to other countries, particularly those dependent on its investments and international political influence, the function of political-military control over geopolitical areas where they are able to act as gendarmes of capitalist interests in general and US imperialism in particular. The example of Israel is exemplary.

So what is the point in Palestine or Lebanon – which is a refuge for nearly half a million Palestinians and where Hezbollah militiamen operate freely – when tensions are escalating, of all the fuss being made every time about the now trite and stale “right” of the Palestinians to their own independent state (enshrined in UN resolutions since 1948!) which neither Israel, nor the United States, let alone the overrated European Union, nor the other various world powers, has never done anything to achieve ? It serves to pull the wool over the eyes of the Palestinians, the Arab masses and the proletarians of all countries, who illusorily expect the same great powers that have brought about an intractable situation to put an end to the tragedy of the Palestinian people.

It was already clear to us Marxists at that time, after the end of the imperialist war, that all the problems which imperialism had not solved and could not solve because of the increasingly contradictory interests of the various imperialist poles would become even more exacerbated; and that this exacerbation in the economic and social spheres will hit 99% of the proletarian masses directly affected – thus primarily those in the colonial and semi-colonial countries – and in a very high percentage also the proletarian masses of the defeated countries of the war on whom the post-war reconstruction would burden particularly heavily.

As we have repeatedly pointed out, the Palestinian bourgeoisie, like others, was unable to take advantage of the post-war situation in the world, which saw the emergence of anti-colonial uprisings that severely tested the resilience of the old colonial powers. Its “democratic revolution” did not see the light of day as, for example, in Algeria, Congo or China; the vestiges of tribalism and pre-capitalist society that were still present throughout the Arab Middle East were an obstacle that could only be destroyed by a great insurrectionary movement aimed at getting rid of these vestiges definitively by destroying them, But the Arab privileged strata of the time, despite the widespread uprisings and popular revolts, preferred to bargain for their privileges with the new powers that had taken the place of the Ottoman Empire, essentially entrusting them with the task of “settling” the quarrels between the various clans and over the borders of the new countries, and took upon themselves the task of suppressing the rebellious and revolutionary impulses of their own working and dispossessed masses. Meanwhile, capitalism did not lag, asserting itself despite the social and political obstacles of the various clans and tribes, and it was not only oil drilling that demanded wage labour, which increasingly replaced the small peasants ruined by war, capitalist trade and expropriations of their land.

Thus, the Palestinian masses, generally made up of small peasants and petty traders, were transformed into proletarian masses, into wage labourers at the disposal of any bourgeoisie, any capitalist, and all the more so as perennial refugees. As in all other parts of the world, the advance of capitalism does not stop at the impotence of a particular bourgeoisie: there are other, more organised and stronger bourgeoisies that take the place of the weaker and historically belated ones; capitalist development, if on the one hand it ruins whole strata of the population and causes uneven development in many parts of the world, cannot but produce on the other hand ever more proletarians, wage-labourers, labourers without reserves, who are forced to submit to bourgeois laws and to the productive and social relations which capitalism dictates likewise to the bourgeoisies themselves.

The great new reality that appeared in Palestine between the 1960s and 1970s was the creation of a proletarian mass that was deprived of everything, of its land, its handicraft, its home, which could have become its “homeland” but did not. Perennial refugees, the Palestinian proletarians – precisely because they are proletarians, and because they are accustomed to armed struggle and untamed – have always posed a potential danger to all the bourgeoisies in the region, starting with their own bourgeoisie, which used their blood to strengthen its class relations with the more powerful bourgeoisies, which were more willing, occasionally, to support it.

But the struggle of the Palestinian proletarians, who have been waiting for decades for a territory, continually deluded by their own bourgeoisie that they could achieve it as an “independent” nation and to which refugees located in other countries could finally return, has, in fact, a different perspective: a class perspective, the perspective of a struggle that would unite the proletarians of the very countries to which they have taken refuge – as has already begun to happen in Beirut in 1982 –, a struggle that objectively takes place in the international context both because the Palestinian proletarians are present and exploited in many Middle Eastern countries, and thus not only in Israel; but also because they have to fight, as has happened several times in recent decades, against the bourgeoisies of the region, which, irrespective of their constant contrasts among themselves, have always allied themselves against the Palestinian proletarians.

This struggle, which, of course, cannot be carried out because of the mere will of some supranational body, even if it were the revolutionary communist party, can only emerge in situations in which the proletarians succeed in destroying the competition among themselves, which the Palestinian bourgeoisie itself first and all the other bourgeoisies are constantly nourishing, knowing that this competition among the proletarians is the most favourable factor for their exploitation and for their disunity.

On the other hand, one should not belittle the behaviour of the Israeli proletariat, especially its Jewish majority, which, vis-à-vis the Palestinian proletarians and vis-à-vis the Arab proletarians themselves having Israeli citizenship, functions as a veritable labour aristocracy, doubly tied to the interests of the preservation of the Israeli bourgeoisie. The more the Israeli bourgeoisie continues to expropriate land from the Palestinians and force them to submit to Israeli interests or emigrate, the more it has an interest in keeping the masses of Israeli proletarians tied to itself through all sorts of privileges. Therefore, although the classist and revolutionary perspective of the proletarian struggle cannot lack the call for the unity of proletarians beyond nationalities in the struggle against the real enemy of all proletarians, i.e. the ruling bourgeoisie, the Palestinian proletarians should not expect, just as they should not expect solutions or improvement of their social and economic conditions from the Palestinian bourgeoisie or other states, much less from imperialist countries, that the Israeli labour aristocracy would engage in the defence of their rights, their recognition as a people having the “right” to be independent. It is no coincidence that in all the cases of abuse of power, of subjection, of occupation of Palestinian land by armed actions by Israeli settlers, and of wars waged by the Israeli bourgeoisie, we have not witnessed any serious proletarian opposition movement on the part of the Israeli proletariat. The latter is still too tied to the material privileges afforded it by the ruling bourgeoisie to jettison them and embrace not only and not so much the “Palestinian cause” (which would already be a step forward in demonstrating that it is not complicit in the national oppression of its own bourgeoisie) but the very “proletarian cause” in which it can recognise itself.

The time will come when the Israeli proletarians will have to answer for their complicity with their own bourgeoisie; the massacres in Gaza and the West Bank will weigh on them too. If what Marx and Engels said about peoples oppressing other peoples was true, it is even more true about proletarians who are complicit in the oppression of other peoples and other proletarians by their own bourgeoisie. History is marked by a justice that is not inscribed in codes of law, but in material realities that drive the dominated and exploited producing classes to rise against the dominant and exploiting classes. It will be the class struggle and revolution, as it has already been the case in the attempts of 1848, 1871 and 1917, that will bring justice and embrace the cause of emancipation, whose objective is not so much the recognition of the “rights” of the oppressed to a more “dignified” life, granted by grace by the ruling bourgeois classes, but precisely the destruction of a society founded on the division into classes, on the capitalist mode of production that has transformed every human activity and every human being into a commodity, on the political and social domination of a ruling class that knows no limits to its ferocity in crushing movements and peoples that stand in the way of its interests.

To advocate such a perspective today, when no proletarian struggle with the characteristics of a class and revolutionary struggle appears on the foreseeable horizon, may seem like a dream of fantasists. It seemed so in 1917, in the midst of the world imperialist war, when the Russian proletariat – then in a considerable minority compared to the peasant masses – rose simultaneously against the imperialist war, against Tsarism and against the national bourgeoisie – and embraced this very perspective with such force and conviction that it provoked in all the imperialist powers a real fear of losing control not only over Russia but over the whole world. In 1848, the revolutionary proletarians in Europe were defeated in one month in Milan, Vienna, Frankfurt, Berlin, Budapest and Paris because they were too isolated from each other and because their struggle had not yet reached the level of the international programme of revolutionary communism which only the Manifesto of Marx and Engels was able to represent. The revolution of the Communards in 1871 lasted little more than two months, but it was capable of expressing the fundamental points that Marxism had already emphasized: the class interests of the proletariat clashed directly with the class interests of the French and Prussian bourgeoisie – that is why they allied themselves against the proletariat of Paris – and only the absence of a clear and precise long-term revolutionary program and the extreme isolation of the proletariat in France and in Europe determined their defeat. In 1917, the proletarian revolution triumphed and, based on the experience of the Paris Commune, established the politically projected and much more organised class dictatorship which, throughout Europe and the colonies, fomented a revolutionary upsurge on the largest scale, which could achieve what the Paris Commune had failed to accomplish, namely, the launching of a world revolution of the European and world proletariat; Nevertheless, within ten years – due to the yielding to the ideological and tactical premises of the social-democratic opportunism of the most important communist parties, such as the German and French, and the de facto isolation of the Soviet proletarian dictatorship – proletarian power turned in on itself and found itself captive to degeneration, which was eroding it from within; in place of the world proletarian revolution, which could have broken out again with vigour in Germany in 1923 and in China in 1927, came the Russian state interest and the outrageous “national road to socialism”.

History must be read without ideological prejudices, and the events that mark the various historical phases must be subjected to the dynamic balance sheet that only Marxism was and is capable of. Marx has been a teacher of this since 1848 and Lenin since 1914: these are lessons that the forces of world opportunism have striven to mystify and bury; only a clearly defined political current, i.e. the current of the Communist Left of Italy, has proved its ability to draw from them, thanks to a single method, that of the uncompromising application of Marxism – i.e. historical and dialectical materialism – to the history of human societies, their development and their contradictions, with the tenacity and patience characteristic of scientific research, which does not allow itself to be limited by the years of life of scientists of one name or another.

The Industrial Revolution, which marked the advent of capitalism in the world, began its steps in England, and in 1640 the first bourgeois revolution was set in motion there. It took 150 years for the bourgeois revolution in France, thus the revolution in feudal Europe, but meanwhile capitalism as a mode of production continued its unstoppable development. It took another 130 years or so for the anti-feudal revolution to take place in Russia, while capitalism was transforming into monopolistic capitalism, and therefore imperialism, whose ripe contradictions resulted in the world imperialist conflict of 1914–1918; meanwhile Asia and Africa remained economically backward and largely in despotic-feudal-tribal formations, which the imperialist powers continued to keep alive for their exclusive interests of economic domination and political influence. But the development of the productive forces which capitalism had long set in motion, and which the imperialist powers, though they tried to retard and could not contain, was destined to smash ancient political and social forms which no longer corresponded to modern industry, modern commerce and finance. The second world imperialist war, while confirming the Marxist predictions of the ever-intensifying contradictions of capitalist development and the ever-intensifying conflicts between imperialist powers, at the same time set off a long period of anti-colonial uprisings in Asia and Africa. In 1975, the first great world capitalist crisis would occur, bringing to a close the long period of post-war economic and financial expansion and the anti-colonial revolts themselves; but as the class movement of the proletariat had not yet recovered from the deep decline it suffered in 1926–1927, these anti-colonial uprisings did not have the possibility – as the programme of the Communist International in its 1920 theses, which all the communists of the world were to work to realise, indicated – to link up with the class struggle which the proletariat was to unleash in the imperialist countries against the bourgeoisies there, taking advantage of the difficulties which the anti-colonial uprisings themselves had created. And so, above all, due to the tragic effects that the various waves of opportunism had on the world proletarian movement, today the proletarians of the weakest countries, systematically plundered by the imperialist powers, are suffering the most severe consequences both of the crises into which their countries are plunged and of the wage and national oppression imposed by the stronger imperialist countries.

The Palestinian proletarians find themselves in this infernal circle, as do many other proletarians forced to become, as a result of famines, regional wars, economic crises and the most brutal repression, perennial refugees desperately in quest of a country or refuge where they can pause their flight, at least for a while. The Palestinian proletarians, and especially those of Gaza, are experiencing the longest and cruellest repression, whose armed executor is evidently Israel, even though it is sanctioned and wanted by the hands beneath the mask of the many Arab and European countries, and not least the United States of America, which have an interest in permanently neutralising this Palestinian powder keg.

As things stand, Washington, London, Paris, Berlin, Moscow, Rome, Beijing, Cairo, Riyadh, Amman and hundreds of other capitals can continue to suck the blood of their proletarians without having to worry about the contagion of untamed struggle, for it has been and continues to be suffocated by the hand of Israel; Tehran and Damascus, apart from their support for the Shiite Hezbollah militias and their historical aversion to Israel, have no particular love for the Palestinians, given that Iran is not accepting any Palestinian refugees because it has no interest in importing a “powder keg” into its own bowels, and that Syria, while forcibly hosting some half a million Palestinian refugees, has imposed miserable living conditions on them without any real support or protection. In fact, their so-called support, through funding and arming Lebanese Hezbollah, is provided solely with an anti-Israeli function. What is more, for Iran in particular, the longer the 'Palestinian question' remains unresolved, the more Tehran can act as a regional power seeking hegemony in the entire region, opposed certainly by Israel, the United States and also by Saudi Arabia. But after the start of the Israeli war against Gaza and its carpet bombing of the Palestinian civilian population, Washington's initiative through the famous Abraham Accords (of 15. September 2020) to pave the way for a rapprochement between Tel Aviv and Riyadh to act together against Iran, failed and instead led to the conclusion of completely opposite agreements between Riyadh and Tehran, promoted by China to act together against Israel. And while this is only a fraction of the constant complications and alternation of fronts of which the Middle East is the champion, it does show that for the umpteenth time, the declared “friends” and “enemies” of the Palestinians have the same interest in ensuring that the “Palestinian question” is never resolved.

By murdering as many Palestinians in Gaza as possible, by continuing to confiscate land from Palestinians in the West Bank, and by forcing hundreds of thousands more Palestinians to seek refuge elsewhere, thus swelling the already 5 million refugees in various Arab countries, will the Netanyahu government actually succeed in pulling the decades-long thorn in its side that is the Palestinians and finally realise the age-old dream of Greater Israel ?

If history has so far been cursed for the Palestinians, it is equally so for the Israelis. Too many conflicting bourgeois interests have accumulated in the region, and even the feared extension of the war with the involvement of Iran –provoked on the other hand by Israel's armed intervention on Iranian soil – will not be able to bring about a “solution”, precisely because the problem is not local but international: such a war would suddenly become a “vital” problem, not only for Israel or Iran, but also for the United States, and therefore for China, which would not have sought to bring Iran and Saudi Arabia to the agreement without striving – apart from oil supplies – for imperialist influence in the entire region of the Middle East and from there to the Horn of Africa and the Mediterranean.

The Palestinian bourgeoisie whose expression is the Palestinian National Authority (PNA), has already demonstrated that it is ready to sell itself to the highest bidder: be it to Israel, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Egypt, Turkey, the United States or China; however, its “commercial value” depends on its ability to act as a second-order gendarme for the Palestinian masses, and it is with this aim in mind that it has offered to take over the “administration” of Gaza after Hamas has, of course, been eliminated by Israel and the thousands of displaced Palestinians who no longer know where to turn are so exhausted that they will accept any “master” to survive.

The proletarians of Gaza, the West Bank, the Palestinian proletarian refugees in Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt or anywhere else have a common immediate and future interest: to recognise themselves as members of the same proletarian class, who, notwithstanding their scattering across different territories, are first and foremost enemies of the Palestinian bourgeois class itself, which has systematically betrayed them and profited from their blood, and to recognise as their friends and allies all proletarians of any other nationality willing to fight against the oppression that the various bourgeoisies systematically inflict on them; on this basis it will be possible to base both the struggle against competition between proletarians and the struggle against the class collaboration constantly nourished by the Palestinian bourgeoisie and the other bourgeoisies, all of which are interested above all in defending their share, however small and bargained for with the great powers, of political and social domination.

The class struggle, which aims at the anti-capitalist and therefore anti-bourgeois revolution, is not born overnight, but is the result of many local, immediate struggles, and therefore many defeats, which nevertheless constitute the experience on which proletarian classist consciousness is formed; it transcends all local and immediate boundaries and is directed towards the unification of local and immediate struggles in the perspective of a vast class struggle in which proletarians of any other nationality are to be drawn. As Marx and Engels stated in the Communist Manifesto, the real fruit of the proletarian struggle lies in class solidarity – clearly distinct from and opposed to national solidarity –because it is this solidarity that consolidates the union of proletarians in a struggle whose horizon is the whole world. And it is precisely through this struggle that the proletariat of any country meets its class party, the party possessing that class consciousness corresponding to the historical aims of the struggle of the world proletariat, aims which cannot but be achieved by way of the class revolution, the proletarian revolution. And this is what the bourgeoisie in every country fears : it has never feared the proletariat as a wage-earning class, for it is the bourgeoisie that created it and from whose exploitation it lives as a ruling class. It fears that the proletariat will become aware that it is not only the class that produces all existing wealth –and that this wealth is being deprived of it in the very first act of production – but that it is the class that has the social power to overthrow capitalist society completely, to revolutionarily destroy its political base of domination, to subsequently subvert its economic structure and pass from capitalism to communism, from the mercantile society dominated by money and the needs of capital to the society in which production is directed exclusively towards the satisfaction of the needs of human life and not the market. The international bourgeoisie had these fears in the glorious years of the October Revolution and its influence on the world proletariat. In the future, it will have them again because the very development of the productive forces, which capitalism cannot stop except temporarily by the destructions of war, has been demanding for at least one hundred and fifty years the destruction of the capitalist forms which fetter it.

The proletarian revolution aims at the realisation of the goal of giving everyone more time to live and fewer hours of social work, which is necessary but not wasteful; it is therefore the only class revolution that aims at overcoming bourgeois society based on the division into classes, and the elimination of the class division of society because the development of the productive forces will allow the harmonious planning of the economy both on a global level and according to the real life needs of the human species, thus definitively freeing it from the need to devote the greater part of its life to the production of commodities, capital and profit. Since there will no longer be class division, there will no longer be ruling classes and dominated classes; but to arrive at this, it is dialectically necessary to go through the class revolution, the class dictatorship and the world revolution. The “quantity” of the struggles of the world proletariat translated into the “quality” of the class and revolutionary struggle will lead humanity to the transition from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom, i.e., to the social life without oppression, without contradictions, without wars. Every human being will be able to devote his time, after contributing his share to social work useful to all mankind, to himself, to his own inclinations, instincts, doing nothing, entertainment, knowledge, science.

We are said to be fantasists, dreamers, utopians. In reality, we are simply Marxists who believe in scientific socialism, to borrow Engels' words, that is, in a method of interpreting human history and the evolution of societies, as the natural sciences have done and do, which never stop at the first result, precisely because the natural world, the biological world, of which Man is also a part, is in constant motion, constantly evolving.

To have been a revolutionary in 1848, 1871, 1917, 1926, 1945, 1975 and today 2024 was and is also to dream of revolution, to dream of it even closer than it actually was and will be; yet the historical confirmations of the extremely unequal and contradictory development of capitalism itself, that Marxism scientifically predicted, have made and continue to make our dream then and now the future reality, notwithstanding the individual life of the communist militant of the nineteenth, twentieth or twenty-first century.

Part of this dream is the awakening of the proletariat to classist struggle; whether this happens on the territory of Palestine or Ukraine, in Iran or China, in Brazil or South Africa, or in our rotten Europe, is of relative importance today. The revolutionary communists who opposed the world imperialist war in 1914, in Germany, in Italy, in France and in Russia itself, certainly dreamed of revolution, despite the unexpected betrayal of the Second International and its parties, but they did not expect the proletarian revolution they had been waiting for since 1848 to break out in the most backward country in Europe, in Tsarist Russia and in the midst of an imperialist war. Yet, it happened. In the future, the proletarian revolution could break out in an important country, but whose political and social solidity would be weakened by inter-imperialist conflicts or war. The bourgeois class has certainly done for decades, and will do everything possible to prevent this happening anywhere. We revolutionary communists have been preparing for it for a long time, and it doesn't matter if we are a small handful of comrades today because we know it will happen, and it doesn't matter in which country it ignites. Will the bearers of the future revolution, which will have to spread, be Palestinian, Italian, Algerian, Brazilian, German, Ukrainian or Korean proletarians? We don't know, but it is certain that they will be proletarians who have been able to accumulate important experiences of struggle in defence of their class interests and who have thus been able to meet the revolutionary communist party, theoretically solid and itself forged in the class struggle. We fight for the class party to be ready when factors favourable to the resumption of the class struggle and revolution appear, and we are sure that these factors will appear.