Posted by John, June 5th, 2010 - under Israel, Palestine.

Tags: Apartheid, Egypt

Analogies are lies which reveal the truth.

Israel is an apartheid state. Zionism is an exclusivist and racist ideology in its vision and practice. In this world view Palestinians are lesser humans. They have no rights to their land.

The 20 percent of the Israeli population who are Palestinian are second class citizens. They sit at the back of the bus. They are poorer, less well educated, have less health care and higher rates of unemployment.

Israel has deliberately created bantustans of the Palestinian areas under its control. Its aim is to expel all Palestinians from the country, a country which has no fixed boundaries. To date they have been stunningly successful in this dispossession – a process of genocide. This map shows that reality.

Like apartheid South Africa, Israel is a limited democracy. It is democracy built on the imprisonment of the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank and the wider region and the second class status of Palestinian Israelis. It is a democracy built on the exclusion of Palestinians.

The analogy falls down in working out the way to defeat apartheid Israel but is instructive nevertheless in seeing the general outlines of the potential for challenging the Israeli dictatorship.

The black working class in South Africa – the vast majority of the country – created the wealth the white ruling class depended on. Its growing consciousness and action as a politicised working class using strikes to fight for freedom shook apartheid to its core.

The white ruling class compromised with the democratic forces arraigned against it. It traded off its political dictatorship to save its economic dictatorship.

The Palestinians are not the black working class equivalent in Israel. The ruling class in Israel survive on the wealth created by 3 different working classes – the Israeli working class, the Palestinian working class and the American working class. (In fact it may be that the Israeli working class creates no surplus value, but that is a question for a more theoretical journal than this Daily Telegraph of revolution.)

The Israeli working class depends for its privileged position on the existence of the current arrangements. It is a bastion of reaction (much as the white working class in South Africa was).

The Palestinian working class in Israel is not in an economically strong enough position to fundamentally challenge the rule of Israeli captial.

The privileged position of Israel economically depends in large part on US aid of between $5 and $6 billion a year. Without the military and economic aid and political support the US state provides Israel could not survive.

The US provides this munificence because Israel performs a vital function for American imperialism in the region. It is much cheaper to fund Israel than have a large permanent US military presence in the region costing tens if not hundreds of billions a year to ensure US control of the most vital product to the world economy – oil.

So in any campaign for Palestinian freedom a successful fight in America against US support for Israel is an important component. Indeed every strike in the United States, every campaign for justice (e.g. against Arizona’s juan crow laws) is objectively a blow for Palestinian freedom.

Success in other areas – e.g. in breaking the blockade of Gaza or in overthrowing US puppet Mubarak in Egypt and more generally against the US war machine in Afghanistan – opens up a space for Palestinian freedom.

In 2008 workers and the rural poor challenged Mubarak. Their economic and political discontent cannot be stifled forever.

The Egyptian masses have the power to overthrow the US backed dictatorship. The power of workers and the support and activity of the rural poor provides the basis for a successful revolution.

Even if that revolution remains within bourgeois capitalist terms (and the dynamic of workers’ power driving the fight for freedom means it may not) it will fundamentally alter the politics of the region. By its very existence a popular regime in Egypt challenges Israel.

Such a regime cannot come to power without an agenda for freedom for Palestine. If there are popular and democratic forms of rule it cannot resile from its tasks.

The success in ridding the world of another American dictator will be an inspiration to the masses in other countries in the region and in Palestine in particular. It will shake the grip of US power in the region, weaken its resolve and create challenges to US rule throughout the area. Israel will be weakened.

Therein lies hope for Palestine.

The road to Jerusalem runs through Cairo.

In the next article, John will look at North Korea and Israel.