by the Editorial Board
Today, Zionism’s best resource for its survival is not the tank and bomb, but the liberal and humanitarian-branded Zionist. The Zionist which comes in the form of J Street or Bernie Sanders is far more useful to the longevity of Zionist brutality and the realization of the Zionist project. In every case of horrific systems, it is the honest administrator, the good-cop, who does the most harm, because it is he who allows a system on its last legs to go on a little longer. In this regard, “Labor” Zionism has been just the face-lift the devil needed before walking into church. Whereas, on the other hand, Netanyahu becomes a scapegoat for their shared cause of genocide.
If genocide is reduced to the policy of a single government, then the class and ideological forces which lead to it can be concealed. It is not the policy but the objectives of the US imperialists and the Israeli ruling class which are truly responsible, and these include all the pearl-clutching liberals who have not got the guts to demand “ceasefire now” of the very government they place the blame on.
Next November we must remember this November. The US imperialist Democratic Party has lost a few voters who still clung to their coattails as they watched in horror as their party demanded more money for genocide and parroted the worst Zionist falsehoods. But, the Democrats still have one year to re-brand their evil as the lesser of two, and to sell their more friendly Zionism to those who finally abandoned them, so that by next November, they hope all will forget this November. The biggest selling point in this farce will undoubtedly be based on what is already on display from the Social-Democratic “left” wing of the Democratic Party, a tried and true tactic of liberal Zionism: shift the blame for excesses onto a given government, and seek to replace that particular government so Israel can “defend itself” with more bloodshed under another.
Next November you will be asked to vote for the liberals who couch their overt support for genocide in the toothless criticisms of Israel against those who issue their naked support with a little more honesty, as if adding lies and smiles to bombs makes them any less deadly to hospitals full of children. You will consider voting for the rake that tells you he opposes illegal settlements in the West Bank and Gaza, as if Tel Aviv is not also a settlement, and somehow the legality imposed on the Palestinian people without their involvement by their British colonial masters were in any way legitimate. And that, friends, is how you are expected to come around to support Zionism in one of its shades. This is the fate which befalls all those who continue hitching themselves to the Democratic Party of the US imperialist ruling class. The apparent lesser of two evils is a sales pitch to allow the net increase of evil.
Conspiracy theory finds traction in this political maneuver as well. “The Netanyahu government did October 7th” is already on the lips of the PR firms of imperialism; the fact that the Israeli state had intelligence regarding the attack is now being used to suggest that it was in their interests and that they desired a cause to wage war. This line of thinking fails to grasp how state intelligence apparatuses work in the first place, and in the second forgets that the state of Israel has been genociding Palestinians under every administration it has had since 1948. First, state intelligence in a capitalist society cannot be separated from the state itself, as an apparatus in which the minority control the majority. It will accumulate a massive amount of intelligence but never on the basis of mass support for the objectives of the state, rather on the basis of control—hence there is not a relationship of support from the masses and the information gathered will be mainly false. Separating the true from the false is an art which no bourgeois state, and no state controlled by imperialism, has managed in the epoch of imperialism. Only a state in which the majority rule over the minority can there be confidence in the quality of a mass quantity of information.
Secondly, October 7th is not itself the cause of genocide; it is not a retaliatory action on the part of Israel but an unfolding of the process of Israel’s existence, an existence delicately perched on the point of the gun. Israel could not exist without genocide, settlement, and the obliteration of democracy. It exists as it does today to meet the concrete imperialist objectives of its masters, mainly in the US, and it cannot do this without massive bloodshed and war.
The act of voting in the US reflects only the desperation of the ruling class to lend a veneer of choice and support to their anti-social rule. Next November will be the most farcical in a long line of farcical elections. The masses will vote in less numbers than they did in the previous election, showing some of the lowest voter rates in the developed nations. The revisionists will make excuses as to why they continue supporting an increasingly right-wing party.
The revolutionaries, the genuine socialists, will challenge the entire system by politicizing these conditions, turning a refusal to vote into a mechanism of increased class consciousness serving the demand for a whole new system in which society comes first, and socialist revolution is brought back into the discussion. Has it ever been more clear that the propertied classes are unfit to make decisions for us? How much longer can you participate in the farce and at what expense? These are the questions that progressives need to ask themselves. The answers will transform them into fighters for a class, and it is the class struggle which will forge millions into revolutionaries. The future is bright, but only when the blinders are removed.
photo: Biden and Netanyahu in 2016, US Embassy Tel Aviv
