The Importance of Anti-Imperialist International Politics: Against “AngryWorkers” on Palestine

Israel has been slaughtering Palestinians since the establishment of the Israeli state in 1948. The modern history of Palestine, from the British Mandate to this very day, is characterized by the brutal oppression of Palestinians, either happily ignored or actively supported by Western powers. After all, the West is accustomed to colonialism; it would be terribly unfair of them to deny to Israel the pleasures of violence and pillage that they have so long enjoyed.

The recent history of Palestine is absolutely puzzling when examined in its proper context. Jewish people live in Palestine. Christians live in Palestine. Muslims live in Palestine. And yet, Zionists claim that Palestine must be ruled by Israel, occupied by Israel, besieged by Israel, until the natives are driven from their land and replaced by their occupiers, all in the name of some fabled return to the “promised land” that Jewish people were already a part of, ethnostate or no. Israel was not content with peaceful co-existence, and has instead carried out repulsive deeds in order to rule over Palestine. Even in this most surface-level analysis, it is clear that the Palestinian people are the victims of an old-school colonial policy, one that puts violence and deprivation at the forefront and does so shamelessly.

It is similarly clear that leftists — communists, anarchists, socialists, whatever sect you come from — should support colonized peoples in their struggle for self-determination. Especially American and British leftists, who live in so fragile a glass house with regard to colonialism that they shouldn’t even breathe too heavily, let alone risk throwing any stones. Supporting the Palestinian right to self-determination is an absolute no-brainer. Further, for communists specifically, supporting the Palestinian right to armed struggle and re-organization into an independent Palestinian state should be simple. Organizing unions, forming the vanguard, carrying out the revolution, resolving the contradictions, building communism, all of these things can only be done by the living. Step one is to live, and all the rest comes after.

This should be simple. And yet.

There are those among the left — a small minority, I believe, I hope — who feel the need to complicate things. Who argue that Palestine isn’t resisting correctly. Who argue that the methods of the Palestinians aren’t ideologically pure, and should therefore be condemned. This general strain of leftism, which leans towards ultra tendencies but isn’t quite unified enough in my eyes to be confidently classified as anything in particular, is unbearably privileged. Here I want to specifically address an article published by “AngryWorkers,” sometimes “Angry Workers of the World,” titled “Editorial #3: Palestine — Israel.” I won’t link the article here — they don’t deserve the traffic — but you’re free to look it up on your own, if you want to suffer for a bit.

Rather than my typical style of presenting the argument put forth in one section and addressing it in another, I am going to take this step-by-step, since this article makes a lot of claims which vary from insightful to insufferably wrongheaded.

They begin by addressing the international response to the situation:

Everywhere, the bourgeoisie and middle classes, along with their representatives in the press and state, have wept over the mounting corpses in the hopes that their crocodile tears will wash away the evidence of their complicity in this barbarism. It is crucial that the working class, both in the Middle East and the world over, sees through this pantomime.

This is true; some governments and government officials have issued statements of lukewarm support for Palestine, mostly in the sense that “both sides of the conflict are wrong and the violence should stop,” which is of course a coded call for a return to the status quo of Israel slowly killing Palestinians, rather than being so gauche as to do it in the public eye. As of the time of writing, yesterday the Irish government even managed to correctly call a spade a spade, referring to the Israeli “de facto annexation” of Palestinian land — although the government stopped short of expelling the Israeli ambassador or supporting the Palestinian armed struggle, and (minus Sinn Fein) condemned Hamas. However, these same governments and officials have spent the last almost-century enabling this. Without Western support, things would never have gotten this bad. At the height of the recent wave of Israeli forced evictions and murders, President Biden even sent $735 million worth of weapons to Israel. AngryWorkers is entirely right to call these hypocritical expressions of support “crocodile tears.”

And then things get a bit muddled. The AngryWorkers editorial board references the Israeli policy of forcing Palestinians from their homes, but refers to the displaced Palestinians as “the Palestinian petit-bourgeois.” While this may in some cases be true, it is strange at best and revisionist at worst to claim that the only Palestinians who have been evicted are petit-bourgeois. In fact, it’s strange to refer to their class characteristics at all, given that they are clearly not in any position of power; referring to the displaced as petit-bourgeois is a clear signal of distaste or hostility.

But then, alliances with the petit-bourgeois are not unheard of; in fact, Mao wrote at length about the necessity of temporarily allying with all elements of the bourgeoisie against larger threats. Perhaps this designation as petit-bourgeois is not as mean-spirited as it initially seems, then, and besides, this is only the second paragraph. I’ll allow them to elaborate.

The petit bourgeoisie or middle classes, composed of the professionals and bureaucrats and small business owners who dream of ascending to the status of capitalist proper, is always doomed to be crushed by the crises of capital. This gives them a desire to clasp onto what little property they have, defending it to the death, and jettisoning the sections of its class it can easily identify and throw to the wolves.

Again, are these the only Palestinians who have been evicted? And if Sheikh Jarrah, the neighborhood that was the epicenter of this most recent slaughter, is as thoroughly middle class as AngryWorkers is intent on claiming, does it matter? Is it right to reduce the Israeli campaign of extermination to a mere “crisis of capital”? And further, are the Palestinians defending their property to the death because they are middle class (as the above quote implies) or because they are desperate not to be killed by a bloodthirsty neighbor?

As for the claim that Palestinians are throwing each other “to the wolves,” this is disgusting. Where are Palestinians doing this? When we see pictures of brave resistance fighters with rifles banding together in groups in shattered streets and the husks of buildings bombed by Israeli airstrikes, is that what AngryWorkers means? Or are they referring to the Palestinians who have risked their lives to pull each other from the rubble, to stand in front of the Israeli “Defense Forces” unafraid? Or maybe they mean the martyrs, who are ready to die for their comrades if it gives them a chance at survival. While this claim may be accurate for the petit-bourgeois in general in relation to crises of capital generally, stating this immediately after reducing the residents of Sheikh Jarrah to the petit-bourgeois is repugnant. This is no mere crisis of capital, and the people of Palestine, whether they are middle class (whatever that means when you live under an iron-fisted occupation) or not, are not what this editorial makes them out to be.

Ah, but you see, AngryWorkers has considered my criticism in advance and addressed it:

The leftist whinging about the particular evils of the ‘Zionist’ state is a smokescreen that covers up its real character as a perfectly normal state completing its objective tasks.

I don’t need to spend too much time on this. It has been proven time and time again that the state is a tool, and that the state can be used to facilitate the building of communism until such a time as it can be dismantled or make itself unnecessary. The argument here is that all states are Israel, which is simply not true. And besides that, if it were true, what is the point of bringing it up here? The argumentative function that this serves is to hijack this editorial, which should be about Palestinian armed struggle if its about anything at all, and to make it instead a condemnation of all states. Once again, this is not a point I will linger on. The calls for a “no-state solution” in Palestine are nothing but the infantile disorder that Lenin so masterfully debunked. They are utopian, unhelpful, and downright smarmy.

These low wages are then used as a pretext to lower the wages of the also impoverished Israeli working class as well, two million of whom are in poverty and rely on charity just to eat twice a day. Therefore, while it is sold to them as the only way to ensure their relative security, the Israeli expansion policy is actually the mechanism for their intense exploitation.

Here is a good analysis. The Israeli state treats its working class like dirt, then blames the Palestinians, therefore disrupting any hope of international working class solidarity and selling the idea of Palestinian destruction to a desperate proletariat. This analysis is immediately spoiled:

[Both the Palestinian and Israeli proletariat] is then fed its own nationalist myth: the lie that its own bourgeois state will look out for it and build the harmonious community that will allow it to prosper.

The implicit call for a no-state solution; see above. Read Lenin.

The Palestinian state powers undoubtedly have less military power and international state support in comparison to Israel — but that doesn’t make them ‘better’ or more worthy of support. This may shock the ‘anti-colonial’ left. On the one hand, we have the Fatah-controlled Palestinian Authority dominant in the West Bank, recognised by international capital, and, on the other, we have Hamas in Gaza, backed by Iran. Both are utterly bourgeois parties, made up of family-clans that work to reinforce each others’ domination over the limited resources in their territory and control the massive flows of foreign aid, brutally crushing the Palestinian working class.

There are two points here that are worth discussing. First, AngryWorkers is quite right that Palestine’s relative weakness doesn’t make them worth supporting. Their status as oppressed people with the Israeli boot on their neck, however does. No one supports Palestine because they’re the underdog, we support Palestine because we should always support the colonized against the colonizers. And notice the sneering scare-quotes around “anti-colonial” left — what purpose does that serve? Should the left not be anti-colonial? Or perhaps they mean to suggest that the real anti-colonial left, i.e. AngryWorkers, shouldn’t support the colonized in their struggle for freedom? That would be a strange position to hold, but then, this article is full of those.

The second point of note is that pitiful “both sides”ing going on here. The Palestinian resistance is bad, you see, because they are bourgeois, and we must never cooperate with the bourgeoisie no matter what; Mao turns over in his grave. And god forbid Hamas accept Iranian support in their struggle for survival. They should turn their nose up at that blood money and die with their honor intact — such is the position of AngryWorkers. Whether or not Hamas is a communist group is, again, absolutely irrelevant. Hamas is one of the groups within Palestine that is asserting the Palestinian right to survival. Once the lives of Palestinians are no longer sixty seconds away from being ended at any given moment, we can quibble over which party to support — although it’s worth noting here that Palestinians overwhelmingly voted for Hamas this year. Does the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine sound like a better group to us, sitting comfortably in our homes in the West? Sure. I don’t deny that for a moment. But I’m not a Palestinian. I don’t get a say, especially not right now, when the issue on the table is whether or not Palestinians have a right to live. It’s neither the responsibility nor the right of Westerners to dictate the affairs of the Middle East. You’d think leftists would have learned this by now. At least, you’d hope.

As for the allegation that both of these “bourgeois parties” are “brutally crushing the Palestinian working class,” I only ask: who is regulating the amount of calories that Palestinians are allowed to eat? Who is forcing them from their homes, regulating the flow of goods into and out of their country, and bombing them relentlessly? The answer, of course, is Israel. This attempt at redirection of the conflict inward is infantile.

Note, again, that I’m not claiming that Hamas or the Palestinian Authority are communist groups. That’s not the point. Self-determination, or at the very least a basic sense of safety, is the necessary first step toward any kind of socialist movement. If Hamas and the Palestinian Authority (controlled by Fatah, as noted above, which was the second most popular party in the 2021 Palestinian elections) are the groups that the Palestinian people choose to help them rid themselves of Israeli occupation, then so be it. Frankly, these issues were put to bed as long ago as the Second International, and it would be laughable to see so-called leftist groups revive them now if it weren’t so frustrating.

The next paragraph is basically incomprehensible, but in the middle of the nonsense, a sharp point sticks out:

For this reason, Hamas used the increasingly provocative actions of the Israeli state as a pretext with which to attack it and further these goals. The provocative shelling of Israeli territory with 3,000 rockets was an act designed to shore up its increasingly unstable local position by tightening its grasp on the population. These inconvenient truths are seen to undermine the struggle for the freedom of people in Palestine, but there it is.

Thank you, AngryWorkers, for bringing the inconvenient truths to light. We are forever indebted to you for exposing the vile imperialist nation of, um, Iran, which is presented here as being a competing power to the United States à la the old USSR vs. US Cold War-era conflicts. What would we do without the white Westerners to tell us that actually, Palestinian self defense and the struggle for self determination is reflective of imperialist Iran using the locals to oppose the United States in the Middle East? Who would we turn to to inform us of the “provocative shelling of Israeli territory” if not the leftists? Never mind that this rhetoric is identical to the rhetoric of the “crocodile tears”-crying governments they cited earlier in the article. Never mind that claiming that this struggle is an attempt by Hamas to “[tighten] its grasp on the population” is entirely unfounded and, again, sounds absolutely identical to racist dog-whistles about “tinpot dictators” and “Arabic despots” that have been spouted by Westerners for centuries. No, when you say it, AngryWorkers, it’s a principled critique.

This editorial is not “seen to” undermine the Palestinian struggle for self determination; it does undermine it. This kind of argument is the sort of thing I would expect to find in some libertarian rag which claims to present “alternative perspectives” but in fact just repackages right wing rhetoric to appeal to an edgier audience. Fortunately, we have only three paragraphs left.

The global left has, of course, joined in on this outpouring of support for the Palestinian state powers, butchers of the working class and tools of the capitalist class. The left should ask themselves what promoting ‘national liberation’ would mean in concrete practice: telling young unemployed men to go on suicide missions in service of the struggle for the ‘Arab people, because in the end ‘you can’t fight tanks with stones?’ Cheering for a party like Hamas as it shells over 3000 Scud missiles? Entering an alliance with murderous bourgeois regimes like Iran, because it’s the ‘lesser evil’ and ‘national liberation’ needs material resources? In their search for a romantic oppressed subject, they end up only supporting bloodshed and genocide. We are not impotently begging for peace. We are pointing out the complicity of the middle class left in the murder of working people.

Once again, we have a claim that the real butchers of Palestinians are the Palestinians themselves, not Israel. Once again, we vilify Hamas, as though they aren’t currently one of many groups in Palestine leading a desperate fight for survival. And what is that claim about “supporting bloodshed and genocide”? We are doing the opposite. Simply put, supporting the opposition to Israel is supporting an end to genocide. Much has already been said by others about the “Scud missiles” claim, but I will briefly rehash the salient point here — Hamas is not launching Scud missiles, but instead cobbled-together missiles that are often built from the leftover materials from used-up Israeli munitions that had previously been fired at Palestine. The rhetorical position here, that Hamas has a huge number of sophisticated missiles, is clearly an attempt to portray Hamas as the agent of a foreign power, probably Iran based on the rest of the editorial, and it is a disgusting misrepresentation of the truth.

As for the “suicide missions” comment, I will say only this: It must be nice to not have to choose between being killed by an omnipresent enemy or risking death resisting them.

It is absurd to claim that the left is searching “for a romantic oppressed subject” in Palestine. The recognition of a people which have, for almost a century, really been oppressed and have really been fighting back to the best of their ability, is nothing more than a recognition of material reality. There is nothing romantic about this. Further, claiming that “the middle class left” supports Palestine is also absurd. One does wonder how, exactly, AngryWorkers defines the middle class, since it seems to include everyone, everywhere, of every political opinion. Finally, I do agree that AngryWorkers aren’t “impotently” begging for peace. A leftist group supporting a thoroughly reactionary position makes a potent tool for our enemies.

The next paragraph is mostly not worth engaging with, minus the introduction:

The working class in Palestine has made valiant efforts to resist its vicious exploitation. Almost none have any continued faith in the existing state powers, even if they do not all yet realise the trap inherent to nationalism itself.

Western chauvinism at its finest. It is true that sometimes, educated communists who have the leisure and privilege to read theory and study history are better able to recognize certain things than the working class, which is worked to the bone by the capitalists with the specific goal of keeping us from learning the way the world works. But this throwaway sentence about the “valiant efforts” of the Palestinian working class in an editorial full of wild claims about the middle-class nature of the Palestinian struggle is nothing more than a worthless token, and the following assertion that “almost none” of them have any faith in the groups that are actually, physically fighting for their survival is both unsourced and miserably wishful thinking. Surely, asserts AngryWorkers, surely they know that their parties have failed our ideological purity tests, and surely they all secretly agree with us that they should lie down and die rather than accept help from those dirty, dirty religious fundamentalists and “imperialist puppets”. After all, the British leftist group declared it so.

Finally, the editorial ends. We can all breathe a sigh of relief as the last paragraph is just a call for solidarity with workers who are striking in harbors and factories that ship and make weapons bound for Israel. That’s good. But wait, what’s this? Oh. It ends with a quote (it looks more like a paraphrase to me, but it may just be from a translation I’ve never seen) from the Communist Manifesto:

“Workers have no fatherlands and communists have no interests separate from the working class”.

Ah. Isn’t it nice to bring back that old quote about the proletariat having no fatherland? And that’s true, to be sure. But to bring it up now, to tell the Palestinians that they shouldn’t be worried about their territory because the concept of a fatherland is not communist, is just… sad. This ending perfectly encapsulates the utopian, ultra-left, left-communist spirit that pervades this entire editorial. Sure, fine, the Palestinians aren’t tied to the land that is Palestine, but they don’t have anywhere else to be. They are penned in on all sides. They are trapped, being starved, being shot at and bombed and beaten to death. They don’t have anywhere to live. Don’t tell them that they don’t have a fatherland, not now, not when they need any land at all to keep themselves alive. The sheer Western condescension that drips from ending the article on that quote is putrid.

Here are some closing questions that may be helpful in understanding why this editorial is so harmful.

1. Who is this for? It seems to be written with white leftists who support the Palestinian right to self-determination in mind, since it certainly doesn’t address the Palestinians themselves.
2. With the audience in mind, what is the purpose? Well, the editorial seems to argue that supporting the Palestinians who are currently literally fighting to the death for their right to survive is something that only uninformed, middle class leftists would stoop to do, so I suppose we can say that the purpose of this editorial is to convince leftists not to support Palestine.
3. Who was this written by? English leftists. As far as I can see, the editorial board don’t identify themselves on their website — their introductory video seems to indicate an intense focus on anonymity, which is fair — so I can’t say whether or how many of them are white. But regardless, they are writing from the heart of an old empire, the very same empire which put the Palestinians in this situation in the first place, and you’d hope that a group of leftists operating in that country would be aware of that and not try to dictate Middle Eastern affairs any further than their country already has.
4. What is to be done? What can we learn from this debacle? I know this is a tired old answer, but genuinely, sincerely, read theory. Or join a reading group, or even listen to a podcast if that’s the most you can muster — god knows it’s not easy to get started, but I would really recommend engaging with primary sources as much as humanly possible. The fact is that if anyone on the editorial board of AngryWorkers had read almost any work by Lenin or Mao, or even just any of the materials related to the second, third, or fourth internationals, they would have understood why their position on this was wrong to begin with. I have no idea if they’re engaging in good faith or not. I have no idea if they’re well-meaning but wrong, or a tool of the oppressors disguised as opposition. But the reason it’s important to read theory is that, when it comes time to act, when it comes time to put the theory into practice, you’ll know how to act.

Well, those are my thoughts on this abomination of an editorial. I apologize if these are not as neatly ordered as the content I typically work to produce; I wanted to respond quickly. Now, how to end this article, hmm… ah, yes, of course, what an easy problem to solve:

FROM THE RIVER TO THE SEA, PALESTINE WILL BE FREE!

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RECOMMENDED READING, for AngryWorkers or anyone else interested:

1. On the Question of the National Bourgeoisie and the Enlightened Gentry, Mao Zedong: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-4/mswv4_32.htm
2. “Left-Wing” Communism, an Infantile Disorder, Vladimir Lenin: https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/lwc/
3. The Fight Against Right and “Ultra-Left” Deviations, Josef Stalin: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1926/ecci-speech.htm