Can an Imperialist Ceasefire Work?  

The announcement that a ‘ceasefire’ has been reached between the Zionist entity and Hamas has been cause for celebration for the Palestinian people. The current ceasefire blueprint was established back in May 2024, a plan which was “endorsed unanimously” by the United Nations Security Council, but whose implementation was blocked by the Netanyahu and Biden administrations in favor of extending the US-funded, Israeli slaughter.

The phased agreement will require a pause in the Israeli genocide in Gaza. This begins with a cessation in the aerial bombardments, drone assassinations, and the withdrawal of Israeli occupation forces from the ‘Netzarim corridor’ inside Gaza and their repositioning between Gaza and the cluster of Israeli settler colonies built along Gaza’s eastern flank.

In the first 42 days, Hamas will release 33 Israeli settler captives, while Israel will release hundreds of Palestinian detainees languishing in Israeli prison torture camps. In the second phase, the remaining male settlers and occupation soldiers would be released, and Israeli occupation forces would withdraw from the Rafah Crossing (between Gaza and Egypt). This would allow for the entry of aid convoys into Gaza, for people to return from makeshift encampments to what’s left of their homes and neighborhoods.

Why Now?

After 15 months of methodical obliteration of Gazan homes, schools, hospitals, and infrastructure and systematic mass-extermination and maiming of Palestinian people, and expanded imperialist offensive into five Arab and Muslim countries in the region, why are the US empire and Zionist regime now willing to enact a ceasefire? Both Joe Biden and Donald Trump are jockeying for credit, proclaiming responsibility for the breakthrough because of their own diplomatic efforts to bring the regional players to the table and to compel Netanyahu and the far right and fascist Zionist regime to comply.

What can be discerned from the recent conjuncture of US ruling class politics is that neither of the US imperialist parties wants to stop the war or contain the Israeli Zionist project. Biden and the Democratic Party have exerted a definitive effort to fund, perpetuate, and prolong the genocide as much as possible.

A self-proclaimed proud “Zionist”, Biden and his administration represented the continuation of decades of the primary US imperial objective of expanding US imperial influence and control across the oil-rich Middle East through its Israeli settler-colonial military proxy. Besides funding the expansive war to more than $20 billion over the last year alone, the Biden Administration and Democratic Party also committed fleets of warships and stationed over 40,000 troop and hardware across to assist and defend Israel in the colonial and genocidal project in the waning months of his presidency. In the last week of his presidency, he announced the final act of sending $8 billion dollars’ worth of even more weapons of mass destruction to the murderous Zionist regime to continue its project.

For his part, Trump and the Republican Party have also demonstrated their unwavering commitment to the US imperial priority of propping up the Zionist regime and arming its expansion and extermination projects. During his first presidency, Trump oversaw the orchestration and implementation of the “Abraham Accords,” which aimed to compel more Arab states to recognize and establish diplomatic relations with Israel as well as moving the US embassy to Jerusalem (as a gesture of support for an expansive Israel). Since 2020, the monarchies of Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, and Morocco, along with the government of Sudan, had joined Egypt and Jordan in recognizing and normalizing relations with Israel.

The accords reflected a new US strategy to further consolidate the Zionist entity and acceptance for its colonial project in the region. In an imperialist gambit, a new realignment was offered in exchange for political and economic concessions to the reactionary and autocratic regimes that have their own regional interests, ambitions, and military objectives in the region and that had outgrown and supplanted a historic pan-Arabic solidarity with the Palestinian people against the Zionist colonial project.  

For instance, the United States recognized and legitimized Morocco’s brutal colonial project in Western Sahara in exchange for Morocco's recognition of Israel and its colonial occupation of Palestine. The US removed Sudan from its list of “state sponsors of terrorism” and gave them a $1.2 billion dollar loan. The Gulf Monarchies of UAE and Bahrain backed the deal to ensure military support and cooperation against Iran, which along with Saudi Arabia, now perceived Iran as the main regional opponent and threat to their interests.

This regional power rivalry and realignment took shape with the Saudi Arabia-led invasion of Yemen in 2015 and brutal war on the Yemeni people after their historic uprising that toppled the US-backed dictatorship of Ali Abdullah Saleh in 2012, and the subsequent rise and success of the Houthi rebellion. The revolution shifted the power balance in Yemen, increasing the influence of Iran as the primary backer of the Houthis, and diminishing the power and influence of the US, Saudi, and Gulf monarchies. Saudi Arabia along with Egypt, Morocco, Jordan, Sudan, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Bahrain—and backed directly by the United States—initiated a devastating war and genocidal economic blockade against the Yemeni people. The United Nations estimated that by the end of 2021, the war in Yemen led to the deaths of at least 377,000 Yemenis and pushed over 16 million Yemenis to the edge of famine—with most deaths caused by forced starvation.

The US imperialist political parties have not only aided and abetted violence, war, and genocide in Palestine and across the region, but have seen the continued expansion of the Israeli colonial project as key to their efforts to remake the Middle East into a collection of client states and colonies with the US as overlord and Israel as its proxy and chief enforcer of the new imperial order. Nevertheless, deepening global economic crisis, imperialist war expanding across multiple continents, and global opposition and an intractable on-the-ground resistance to the US-Israeli onslaught has significantly weakened the resolve to continue US-Israeli operations in current form.

Resistance to US and Israel

Despite the carnage and devastation unleashed on the Palestinian, Lebanese, and Yemeni people by Israel using unmatched US weaponry of mass murder and destruction, the resistance of Hamas, Hezbollah, and Houthi fighters and the resilience of the Palestinians, Lebanese, and Yemeni people have dealt blows and weakened the US-Israeli offensive. Palestinian fighters continue to wage successful guerrilla-style attacks against Zionist occupational forces, Hezbollah fighters have defeated multiple attempts by Zionist forces to invade and re-occupy southern Lebanon despite massive Israel’s incessant bombing of cities and terrorist attacks against the Lebanese people, and Yemeni forces continue to blockade the Red Sea to weapons deliveries and commerce to Israeli ports while also continuing to hit Israeli territory with drones and long-range missiles despite indiscriminate attacks by Israel.

Despite significant repression in imperialist and pro-Zionist countries, and alongside majority sentiment that is anti-Zionist, anti-colonial, and anti-imperialist across the global south, tens of millions of people have actively engaged in protest actions internationally. Activists and actionists have occupied campuses and government buildings, blockaded and sabotaged weapons manufacturers arming the Zionist occupational forces, and have organized boycotts against companies profiting from genocide.

A global resistance movement has taken shape in an unprecedented manner, one that is united against the US and Israel and their accomplices in Western Europe, and one that has remained resilient, courageous, militant, and persistent despite increasing authoritarian repression. The incapacity of the occupational forces to defeat and overrun their opponents in Palestine, Lebanon, and Yemen; as well as the intransigence of the pro-Palestinian solidarity movement amid increasingly anti-democratic and violent police repression of Pro-Palestinian protest action has instead weakened the resolve of the oppressors.

This has been the foremost reason why there is the possibility for a temporary “ceasefire” reluctantly accepted by the aggressors. The trajectory is not sustainable in its current form. But the very conditions for the US and Western European-backed creation and perpetuation of the Israeli settler-colonial project of violence, removal, and genocide against Palestinian and Arab peoples remains intact: to perpetuate and expand US imperial influence and control in the region and the need to arm and grow the Zionist project to remake and exert total control in the region as the next phase of imperial expansion against local resistance, as well as against the US and Europe’s imperialist rivals.  

Can a Ceasefire Hold?

US and Western European countries have armed and enabled Israeli settler-colonial expansion, and campaigns of genocide against the Palestinian people are a central feature of the US grand imperial strategy. Amid a global decline of US economic and political power vis-à-vis its peers and rivals, especially China and Russia, both Democrats and Republicans will continue to empower and enable Zionist expansion in the Middle East. The US needs Israel to topple rival regimes, subdue the people and movements of resistance, and to exert control over the energy resources essential to the functioning of the global capitalist economy (as well as the profits of oil companies, weapons manufacturers, and investment capitalists eager to profit from war and occupation in myriad ways). 

Most significantly, imperial control across the region is key to maintaining US primacy over a globally strategic region as economic crises deepen internationally, and as we are driven closer and into impending global inter-imperialist war and further manifestations of crisis capitalism that will be defining features of the next epoch. For this reason, if implemented in its current form, a ceasefire will likely not hold for very long; especially as the Zionist entity is already demonstrating it has no intention in adhering to the current ceasefire with Lebanon.

As a colonial entity, expanding and growing in direct proportion to the theft and murder of the indigenous people arrayed in a permanent state of resistance, and as an entity whose very existence and persistence is wholly sponsored and nurtured by imperialist powers advancing their interests through colonial methods, Israel can only exist  through waging perpetual war, recurring spasms of colonial violence, and through the destruction of the people and societies that obstruct or resist them. The weight of this contradiction has been borne out by recent events: Israel has depleted its own economy, lost all international credibility, has exposed its essentially terroristic and genocidal nature, all while still not able to claim victory over the heroic and indefatigable resistance and opposition.

For there to be a ceasefire that can be genuinely permanent, then Israel, as a racist, supremacist, genocidal, settler-colonial project that serves as the executioner for US and European imperialism, will have to be defeated, defunded, and permanently dismantled. Only by supporting the frontline resistance, and by joining, strengthening, and making more militant the movements of resistance to Zionism and its architects and enablers within the US empire, can we ensure that the forces of humanity defeat those of empire, war, profit, and genocide.

Socialist Horizon is a revolutionary socialist organization of local organizations building a new socialist movement through class struggle, internationalism, and unity. Learn more about Socialist Horizon at www.socialisthorizon.org.