I’m African, living in Britain. Baby socialist, only just started reading State and Revolution. I attended a meeting with other socialists two weeks ago where they discussed the fans of an Israeli team being banned from attending a football match in England due to their violent nature. It soon devolved into talks of “oh no, we shouldn’t ban the team cuz they’re working people like us”, and “I am uncomfortable with cultural boycotts”. None of them even knew anything about why the team was banned – sort of proving to me that they don’t even keep up with the news. That isn’t even my biggest issue. It’s that none of those sitting around that table had ever experienced what the people of Gaza have had to endure; they haven’t had a family member sniped out of existence by an IDF soldier, they don’t have a brother who’s been disappeared and now currently in an Israeli jail having god knows what done to them, all of us there had a home to go back to, unlike you know, the people of Gaza and the shocking part is that you could tell that they were totally oblivious of this fact and how it might have subconsciously influenced their soft and “rational” opinions on the crisis.
Then last week, we had a Muslim lady who I think has a deep connection to Palestine give a talk on the issue going on and the role of socialists in the crisis. She gave a fantastic, deeply personal speech. I saw this as my opportunity to come in and speak my mind on what/how I felt about the last meeting and how our lack of a personal connection to the crisis softens our opinions, and that we needed to realise this. They all agreed on the spot, only for the leader of that meeting to revert to type talking about how this conflict is a crisis of capitalism and how the “working class of Israel” need to attain consciousness as the reason they want Gaza is because the rent in the major cities in Israel are all so expensive which is what is encouraging expansion into newer lands, and once we raise class consciousness on both Israeli and Palestinian sides, they’ll all live happily ever after. The girl even asked again that what can we do to help now, and he went back to the same “yea, we just gotta, you know, keep spreading the word on class consciousness”. That same day, in the face of a ceasefire, loads of Palestinians have been killed and many more will die. But no, we should keep working to raise class consciousness among a people who have gleefully documented their hatred for the Palestinians for all to see. The USA is more likely to become a socialist state before Israel does, and what are we supposed to do while we wait? Keep reading theory and spreading the word? While literal kids get killed?
Is this what reading theory does to people? Unable to see and experience the world as it is, but every single event must be passed through the lenses of what Marx said over a century ago? This reminds me of Christians who see everything going on in the world today through the lenses of some biblical prophecy or a sign of the end times. What can we do to help people like us in Gaza? Lets read theory and tell the people suffering that everything happening to them is due to capitalism and once we reach the nirvana of class consciousness, everything will be hunky dory. No more hatred, all bombs will disappear, even Americans will all submit their guns etc. Totally unable to see reality and adjust our mindsets to what is going on with the realities of people like us. I am writing this out of frustration because the one people I expected total solidarity from are talking exactly like liberals but with Marxist language, and they seem totally oblivious of this. I am fully aware that ultimately, they’re kind of right; class consciousness is vital to kicking out imperialism and uprooting capitalism, but for fk’s sake what are we doing for the people currently dying or being starved to death right now through the evils of the system? Surely, we can do more than telling them to sit down and listen to theory.
The think the fundamental problem (besides the obvious Western Chauvinism) so many Western Leftists seem to have with Israel is that they don’t understand what state of development it’s in as a settler-colony.
Palestine is to the Israeli proletariat what Ireland was to the British proletariat in Marx’s time. So long as this remains true the only thing a class conscious Israeli comrade can do is to either leave and stop participating in the Zionist Project outright or find some way to aid the Palestinian Resistance.
The average American prole is capable of class consciousness because there is no conscious recognition of the fact that we live in a settler-colony. When we conceptualize Amerindians we don’t think of the present but the past. Settlers, Manifest Destiny, native tribes, etc. are these things from ancient history; not lived experiences of the modern day. I’d wager most Americans probably haven’t even met an indigenous person and when they do they often mistake them for being foreign immigrants. Much of the controversy around indigenous representation stems from the fact that we don’t want to acknowledge who owned the land our house is built on because it’s an uncomfortable topic to broach even if we didn’t have any ancestors who directly partook in the various genocides and massacres. For many of us these are crimes from a hundred years ago committed by people long dead. We can’t conceptualize it as anything else. The Amerindian has been excised from our mind and our status as settler-colonists goes unrecognized at a conscious level even if subconsciously we’re fully aware of it. Where the indigenous people can never forget what we’ve done to them we already have forgotten & buried it.
For Israeli proles none of this is true. The massacre of that Palestinian family happened yesterday, your brother helped do it, and you personally bought the land the family lived on afterwards. You saw nothing wrong with it and have no moral qualms about mocking the survivors. Modern Israel is closer in its development as a settler-colony to 1800s America than the modern USA; the Israeli proletariat are fully aware of their settler-colony and are happy to support its unyielding expansion so long as they continue to benefit. There is no plan to cease expansion; the Zionist Project openly envisions a Lebensraum stretching from the Nile to the Tigris. Their Manifest Destiny is still in full-swing and until it finally ends there’s no chance at awakening class consciousness in a proletariat that is being bribed by ample war spoils and any Arab unfortunate enough to live within the Israeli war path has no time to wait for Kautskyists in the West who’d rather sit on their hands because they care more about helping Israeli labor aristocrats instead of a subaltern people being exterminated by the 21st century Wehrmacht.