Joint Statement of Marksist Tutum and IRMT on the Third Gaza War

The third invasion of Gaza since the 2005 withdrawal has been the most brutal and deadly. In less than a month the death toll has climbed to nearly 2000 and the numbers of injured close to 10,000. Given Gaza’s size and population density most of the fatalities and casualties have been civilians, particularly children.

Under the pretext of creating ‘security’ for its citizens, the Zionists’ military machine has committed atrocity after atrocity with impunity. Despite being in violation of a long list of UN Security Council resolutions going back decades, the Zionist state has had no hesitation in hitting civilian targets from air, land and sea. In one week the Israeli army hit two UNRWA schools sheltering displaced families! It continues to bomb and shell hospitals, schools, homes, mosques and municipal buildings.

It is able to do this because it is the most trusted base of imperialism in the region. It is the ‘unvarnished’ militarist bourgeois state that can carry out the ‘dirty work’ of the democratic American and European imperialists. That is why after issuing some words of condemnation the American imperialists continued to supply the Israeli army with new shells.

The firing of more than 3000 mostly ineffective rockets and inflammatory rhetoric from Hamas about ‘resistance’ have created substantial sympathy for this organisation. But why does Hamas want to monopolise the resistance? Why hasn’t it built a workers’ or popular militia? It has had many years and funding and armaments to do this. Why is it that right now all the youth of Gaza have for fighting against the invading soldiers are rubble left from the Israeli bombardment of their homes?

Hamas’s mini state knows that the arming of the Palestinian masses will lead to its own immediate downfall! For years it has oppressed the Palestinian masses. It has promoted reactionary and fundamentalist ideas, it has suppressed all progressive movements or independent activities of workers, students, women and all other layers.

The workers and the poor of the region have a natural sympathy for the suffering Palestinian masses: they have been denied their national and other rights for over 60 years, they are fellow Muslims and Arabs. Parallel with this positive sympathy we have also witnessed the negative ‘sympathy’ and manipulation of reactionary states like the Iranian regime, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Qatar, Turkey and so on. These states intervene in the Palestinian question not because they are concerned about the suffering Palestinian people, but out of their own bourgeois interests. The fact that they support different Palestinian organisations according to their own calculations constitutes a huge barrier towards building workers’ unity across national, ethnic, religious and sectarian divides.

The only genuine way to fight the Israeli invaders and the oppressors of Hamas (and PLO-Fatah) and their regional and international paymasters is to arm the masses and work towards building a third camp made up of Arab, Jewish, Kurdish, Turkish, Iranian and other workers. This will no doubt sound like a long-term aim – but there can be no short-cut to overthrowing capitalism and building a socialist society.

For an international front of all workers and oppressed masses for socialism.

Marksist Tutum

 Iranian Revolutionary Marxists’ Tendency

4 August 2014