Why We Need Theory

Israel’s assault on Palestinians right now is the most extreme offensive Israel has launched in decades. Hundreds of thousands of people are taking to the streets around the world to protest Israel’s siege of Gaza. The widespread demonstrations across the Middle East have threatened instability and have played a role in Biden calling on Israel to slowdown the genocide. 

As the media continues to cover events unfolding in Gaza and the movement grows to defend Palestinians’ right to exist, the need for Marxist theory is evident. Without it, the framework people are given leads them to defending and supporting the status quo, or in this case, Israel as a colonial settler state.

The media refers to the siege on Gaza as the Israel-Hamas War. This furthers the fiction that there are two sides to this “conflict” instead of a one-sided massacre taking place. Hamas, an organization made up of a small number of individuals, is equated with a powerful state that has a full army and the weight of billions of dollars in weapons and military aid from the U.S. behind it (in addition to U.S. ground troops ready to step in). Also, noteworthy is how the media reports what is taking place “in Israel” as if Palestinians are living on Israeli land. 

The need for Marxist theory is especially evident when looking at what’s taking place in the United States. Tens of thousands of people have come out to demonstrations held in every major city. The Palestinian flag has been front and center at the protests. Also for the first time in a generation, there is a Jewish peace movement that is actively participating and playing a leading role in the U.S. Palestinian Solidarity Movement. This is a welcome and important development. There’s no clearer way to distinguish between Judaism and Zionism than seeing thousands of American Jews protesting Israel and standing with Palestinians.

Without a clear Marxist, anti-imperialist framework, the slogans that are dominating social media serve to legitimize the Israeli state and Israel’s right to exist.

However, without a clear Marxist, anti-imperialist framework the slogans that are dominating social media serve to legitimize the Israeli state and Israel’s right to exist. The calls for a ceasefire, peace, and an end to the conflict further the narrative of two equal sides that are equally to blame for the situation. Palestinian resistance to annihilation is equated with Israel’s colonial project of genocide. 

This has been expressed visually as well. There’s an image that is being widely shared by those who genuinely support Palestinians. It consists of the call for ceasefire, a dove for peace, and Anne Frank. While people are understandably making a comparison between the Holocaust and the genocide the words and images continue to grant validity to the state of Israel and, perhaps unintentionally, depict only Jewish suffering while Palestinians are erased from the image and their own fight for existence. 

Being able to see through the language and images that have become normalized as the way to discuss the situation in Palestine, requires more than knowledge of why Israel was created and the history of Israeli and its colonial settler project that has claimed the vast majority of Palestinian land and created apartheid conditions.

As Marxists, we see Israel as a colonial settler state that doesn’t have the right to exist on stolen Palestinian land. We understand that Palestinians not only have the right to resist their conditions of colonial occupation, but that their resistance is also against a larger system of colonialism and imperialism. The US imperial strategy to dominate the oil rich Middle East is the reason for Israel’s existence. That is the reason why the U.S. has chosen to spend over $8 trillion on invading Afghanistan and the invasion and occupation of Iraq, under the phony justification of “fighting terror”. Over 900,000 people have been killed from these wars. 

Palestinians not only have the right to resist their conditions of colonial occupation…their resistance is also against a larger system of colonialism and imperialism.

After WWII, the U.S. emerged as an imperial superpower and began using its military might to gain access to the oil in the Middle East for U.S. oil companies. Israel is a part of U.S. dominance in the region, and has played a pivotal role in militarily defeating, policing, and subduing Arab nations and repressing national liberation movements and oppositional governments across the region. 

Before the U.S., England and France dominated the region and acted in a similar way, invading and propping up dictators and monarchs to keep oil cheap and accessible for their respective oil companies. British, French, and US Imperialist relationships and military interventions across this region since the turn of the 20th century have been maintained through force of arms to generate enormous profits for their capitalist classes, keep out their imperial rivals, and build up their capitalist economies. 

The borders of the Middle East today were created by these colonial powers to ensure weakened and divided Arab nations as an instrument of direct colonial rule until anti-colonial resistance (and later the massive destruction of World War II) made those arrangements untenable. The colonial borders and relationships have been since maintained in different ways, including support for the settling and arming of the Zionist state of Israel, propping up and supporting counter-revolutionary coups, corrupt dictatorships and reactionary monarchies, and through direct military interventions when necessary.   

This need for imperialist powers to dominate through war, occupation, the enforced maintenance of national and ethnic divisions, and the installation and support for puppet dictatorships is built into how capitalism operates. Companies compete on a global market and they use their country’s military to secure the cheapest resources and labor around the world, as well as to open up new markets to sell their goods. 

Capitalism and imperialism go hand in hand, and it’s not just a U.S. and Western European phenomenon. Japan colonized Korea and China. Russia is currently trying to occupy Ukraine. China has its sights on Taiwan. The entire continent of Africa was carved up between European countries. More than 10 million people were killed during Belgium’s occupation alone. 

Capitalism itself could never have come into being without centuries of mass kidnappings and deaths of Africans as they were sent to be tortured and forced into enslavement around the world alongside genocidal wars of displacement of indigenous peoples.

The creation of Israel is part and parcel of the imperialist division of the world into “spheres of influence” dominated by the major capitalist powers.

The creation of Israel is part and parcel of the imperialist division of the world into “spheres of influence” dominated by the major capitalist powers; in this case the United States and Europe. As the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz put it in 1951, just 3 years after the Nakba: 

Israel is to become the watchdog. There is no fear that Israel will undertake any aggressive Policy towards the Arab states when this would explicitly contradict the wishes of the US and Britain. But if for any reasons the Western powers should sometimes prefer to close their eyes, Israel could be relied upon to punish one or several neighbouring states whose discourtesy to the West went beyond the bounds of the permissible.

This dynamic flips the often misunderstood relationship between Israel and the United States—according to which Israel exerts some mysterious control over U.S. policy—completely around. Instead, when we understand US and Western European support for Zionism as part of the broader project of imperialism in the region, we can see that it is Israel that effectively does the bidding of the United States and Europe, not the other way around. In exchange, the imperialist powers give the Zionists free rein to carry out a genocide against the indigenous Palestinians.

Contextualizing Israel’s assault on Palestinians as part of the larger project of U.S. imperialism and control of oil, means not looking to any state to intervene and “save” Palestinians. Russia, China, or any other country would like to control oil in the Middle East just as much as their imperial rivals if they had the military capability to take on the U.S.

It also means not offering any tacit support for Israel or believing that a change in individual leaders will improve the situation. 

Marxist theory isn’t just about understanding what’s motivating the murder of thousands of Palestinian, it’s also a guide for how to fight back in a way that will build solidarity with Palestinians, weaken empire-building in the Middle East, and, ultimately, threaten capitalism.