The fall of the Assad regime, thirteen years after the beginning of the Syrian revolution, is among the most extraordinary events in Middle Eastern history.
The 2011 Syrian revolution was the most far-reaching of all the Arab revolts, penetrating deep into every crevice of society. Driven by poverty, economic crisis and hatred of a brutal authoritarian regime, millions took to the streets demanding an end to the regime.
But President Bashar al-Assad’s vicious strategy to maintain his rule—slaughtering half a million people, flattening cities, imprisoning and torturing tens of thousands, forcing millions into exile—came to embody the smashing of all the dreams of democracy and freedom that animated the Arab revolution in its first months.
The Syrian struggle for freedom was assaulted from every conceivable angle. Peaceful protesters were mowed down in the streets without mercy, forcing the resistance to take up arms and transforming the mass movement into a civil war. When it looked like the rebel forces might finally overcome the regime, Russia, Iran and Hezbollah intervened to choke the life out of free Syrian cities. 
The US initially mouthed support for the revolution. But Washington was never interested in a genuinely democratic Syria, which it accurately judged not to be in its foreign policy interests. The US refused to provide the weaponry the rebels were pleading for, which would have allowed them to defeat the regime. It also blocked other states from providing those weapons. This betrayal didn’t save the Syrian revolution from being slandered by many so-called anti-imperialists on the Western left, who shamefully dismissed Syrian aspirations for freedom from dictatorship as little more than a CIA/Mossad plot.
Years of devastating civil war, foreign intervention and monumental death and displacement destroyed almost all of the revolution’s civic institutions and fed the rise of groups whose aims greatly diverged from the spirit that drove revolutionaries in 2011.
Yet, despite everything, and seemingly against all hope, Assad is suddenly gone. In less than two weeks, a rebel offensive that began in the northern city of Aleppo transformed into an extraordinary nationwide uprising that routed the regime. As rebel forces swept south, taking first Hama and then Homs, it became clear that the regime would get little support from its foreign backers. Rebel factions across the country joined the offensive.
Instead of the much-feared influx of Iranian-backed militias from Iraq to defend the regime, regime fighters fled to Iraq or ditched their military uniforms and left their tanks and weapons lying in the streets.
The great lie—that the Assad regime had the support of large numbers of Syrians—disintegrated as quickly as the regime itself. Without Russia and Iran slaughtering people on its behalf, the regime couldn’t last two weeks. As Assad fled the country, his forces melted away. Even the coastal Alawite areas fell with barely a fight. 
The coalition of fighters behind this extraordinary chain of events was led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS)—an Islamist group originating in Jabhat al-Nusra, which was affiliated with al-Qaeda. However, the group that became HTS broke from al-Qaeda and then re-formed under its current name in 2017. For many years, and especially in the course of this uprising, it has emphasised tolerance of other religious groups and minorities and has disavowed the most reactionary elements that characterised al-Nusra and ISIS.
HTS has for years controlled Idlib in the north-west. During that time, it repressed protests, but nothing remotely on the scale of what either the Assad regime or ISIS have been guilty of. It is far too early to know its role in the coming months. But whatever the sincerity of HTS’s shift to a more inclusive, all-Syrian stance, that stance played a vital and probably decisive role in uniting the country behind the rebel offensive. Unity across religious lines was a crucial part of the initial success of the 2011 revolution and will remain so for its prospects. 
However, with Assad gone, Syria’s free and democratic future hinges on a revival of the extraordinary revolutionary energy that first emerged in 2011. The real hope is that the mass of Syrian people can seize this opportunity to build a society of genuine justice and equality that so many gave their lives for.
The scenes emerging from Syria since the fall of the regime are extraordinary: thousands celebrating on the streets, chanting the slogans of unity and freedom that had been buried under years of counter-revolution. 
All ethnic and religious minorities have been involved. Christians in Aleppo chanted, “Syrians united, we are one people!” and decorated their areas of the city with Christmas trees. Alawites in the port city of Tartous, traditionally an important base for Assad, tore down regime statues to wild cheering. In Iraqi Kurdistan, people filled the streets carrying the flag of the Syrian revolution and chanting, “One, one, the Syrian people are one!”
Multi-coloured Druze flags filled the streets alongside the green and black flag of the revolution. Palestinians in Raml refugee camp in Latakia held a nighttime demonstration, lit up with lanterns, protesting against Assad right before he fell. 
Across the country, statues of Bashar and his father, Hafez al-Assad, came crashing down. In one case, a gold one was used as a sled. People mocked Bashar by ostentatiously walking along the red carpet in his Damascus palace and filming themselves saying banned words. It was a nationwide carnival of celebration.
An extraordinary reversal of the mass displacement of the last thirteen years has also begun. Thousands are returning to cities they were forced from in the war. From Lebanon and Türkiye, enormous convoys of former refugees are streaming back into the country.
Nothing has captured the momentous but also heartbreaking nature of this moment more than the liberation of the prisons. As each city fell to the rebellion, the doors of the regime’s vile and vast jails were broken open. “Hellholes” does not adequately convey their nature. Every Syrian knew the reality of these places. They were no secret—the whole point of them was to instil terror in anyone who thought of resisting the regime. But to see the videos of people emerging from them—people who had endured years of torture, physically and mentally broken; to see toddlers, whose mothers had been raped in prison and who had lived their whole lives in these pits—is devastating beyond words. 
The joy of seeing these prisons empty must be accompanied by rage that they were allowed to endure for so long. There are those in the Palestine solidarity movement who laud Iran or Russia—because they purportedly fight against tyranny—and who defended the regime as a heroic part of the “axis of resistance” right until it fell. 
But Assad did nothing for the Palestinians except massacre them and lock them up. Among the thousands released from the notorious Sednaya Prison were 67 members of the Al-Qassam Brigades and 630 other Palestinians, according to reports. Bashar al-Assad, like his father, never fought Israel, either to defend the Palestinians or to take back occupied Syrian land. 
Even if Assad had supported the Palestinians, it wouldn’t have justified his regime or made the revolution illegitimate. You can’t tolerate one genocide to oppose another.
And while there was support for Assad among some activists in the West, Palestinians themselves sympathised with the uprising from the start. And why wouldn’t they? Who knows better than the Palestinians the meaning of genocide, dispossession and exile? And how could anyone watch the beautiful scenes of Syrian refugees returning to their country and not dream of the day the Palestinians will end their long exile?
In any case, whatever short-term geopolitical benefit Israel might now gain (which is not at all clear), the past year has demonstrated, yet again, that there is no hope for a free Palestine in a Middle East ruled by dictators. The hope that dictators in Tehran and Moscow, any more than those in Cairo or Amman, would liberate Palestine was a fantasy. The only hope for Palestinian liberation is an Arab world with the Arab people themselves in charge.
Overnight, Syria has gone from being the most despotic state in the Middle East to the freest. This is not to say that the country’s problems will be resolved simply. There are enormous issues to be worked through and obstacles to be overcome. After a long dictatorship and civil war, the country is deeply scarred and controlled by militias, many of which have fought each other in recent years. The Israelis have already invaded from the west, the Americans have troops in the south-east, Turkish-backed forces are fighting the Kurds in the north, and ISIS still holds territory in the centre of the country. The struggle ahead will be long and difficult, with no guarantee of success. 
Nevertheless, the precondition for achieving any of the goals of the Syrian revolution was the overthrow of the Assad regime. This is now done; he is gone. The future can start to be written.
Jasmine Duff contributed to this article.

Corey Oakley

Hope returns to Syria

You know the multiverse theory, that there are many parallel universes, and that they may contain alternate versions of ourselves and our conditions in this universe … Well, the last couple of days feel like we’ve jumped from one existence into a parallel universe, one in which a lot more is possible. 
This universe is a flexible, more cheerful place, in which the Syrian revolution may even be resolved. (As it happens, we went the day before yesterday [30 November—ed.] on a trip to Edinburgh to see my son. He bought us tickets to the Museum of Illusions. We walked through an arrangement of swirling lights called The Vortex, and we lost our balance. Was that when it happened? When we got home we heard the news that Aleppo city had been liberated.)
The rebels advanced out of the narrow strip of Idlib in which they and millions of Syrians from around the country had been crammed for over four years. “The rebels” here means a military alliance under the umbrella of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham—the greatly moderated and better organised reincarnation of Jabhat al-Nusra. It’s still an authoritarian Islamist militia, but it’s not at all “like ISIS”, as the uninformed are saying. 
It broke definitively from the ISIS stream in 2014. It has a much more positive policy towards sectarian and ethnic minorities than ISIS. It allows far greater space for pluralism, disagreement and consultation than ISIS did (though it still arrests and detains some political opponents and tortures them). Unlike ISIS, it doesn’t field a Hisba Diwan (morality police) to interfere in people’s daily lives. Its focus is Syrian rather than transnational. It doesn’t threaten the West.
Its Fath al-Mubeen military alliance also incorporates lots of members of other less authoritarian groups that were displaced to Idlib and then gobbled up by HTS. HTS has not been popular among people in Idlib—they’ve been demonstrating against it for months—but its offensive is wildly popular because the people want to be rid of Assad and his foreign backers and to return to their homes.
I didn’t expect the offensive, at least not on this scale. Nobody did. At first, it looked to me like a controlled operation to restore the agreed Astana lines—that is, the division of north-west Syria agreed upon at Astana by Russia, Iran and Turkey. Russia had pushed Turkey to normalise and negotiate with Assad, and Turkey had tried hard to do so. Assad had refused to budge from his maximalist positions, the Russians don’t want to alienate Turkey (given their difficult position attacking Ukraine), and Turkey needs more Syrian territory to which to send Syrian refugees. So perhaps the Turks and Russians were scaring Assad into negotiating by taking a few towns in the Aleppo countryside.
But the offensive went much further than that, far beyond the Astana lines. News came, meanwhile, that the Turks had prevented the Syrian National Army—comprised of former Free Army militias now under Turkish control—from moving towards eastern Aleppo. This allowed the PKK-dominated SDF to take areas in Aleppo abandoned by collapsing Assad forces—surely the opposite of what Turkey wanted. Turkey was not, therefore, in control of events. Turkey clearly didn’t know what was going on.
What this offensive shows, therefore, is Syrians organising themselves, and Assad’s gangster regime crumbling as soon as Russian and Iranian imperialists are unable to protect it. When Assad subjugated free Aleppo in 2016, 80 percent of his ground troops were Iranian-organised transnational Shia militia and the air force was Russian. Now, the Iranian militia system is weak as a result of its targeting by Israel. In particular, Hizbullah was decapitated. (After 2011, Hizbullah turned itself from a resistance organisation into a counter-revolutionary tool, and was infiltrated and now destroyed by Israel as a result – but that’s another story.) The Russians are preoccupied with their invasion of Ukraine. 
In these circumstances, the unsustainable nature of regime rule comes inevitably to the fore. Anybody who knew Syria knew that the regime was widely hated, that it had utterly destroyed the Syrian economy, and that it was held in place only by foreign powers. But nobody expected such a dramatic and sudden turnaround.
The rebels swept into Aleppo city. The regime and the Iranian militias, which had previously spent years battling for the city, fled without resistance. Military analysts say the rebels appear better organised and more disciplined than ever before. Abu Muhammad al-Jolani, the HTS leader, issued directives to his men to respect the civilians of the city, including the large population of Christians and other minorities. 
So far, I have heard one unconfirmed report of a woman being ordered by a rebel fighter to cover her hair, but nothing worse. Apparently, people in the city are nervous of how the rebels may behave, and of course of punitive Russian and Assadist bombing, which has already begun. (It is important to hold the rebel fighters to account, and to high standards. In the past, they have helped the revolution’s enemies with their violations of Syrian people’s rights.)
Key towns in Idlib province were quickly liberated—places that were once full of creative revolutionary activity, like Saraqeb, Khan Sheikhoun, Ma’aret al-Nowman, and Kafranbel. Next, the offensive moved into the Hama countryside, taking towns like Morek. Years’ worth of progress is happening in mere hours. As I write [1 December—ed.], the rebels are at the gates of Hama city.
This is by far the best news in many years. Assad, Iran and Russia are being smashed. Prisoners are being released (moving footage can be seen of prisoners, including many women, rushing out of the dungeons in Aleppo <a href="https://qunfuz.com/2024/04/11/syrian-gulag/">in which they were tortured and starved</a>). Hundreds of thousands of people are returning to their homes.
Apparently, Rastan and Talbiseh, towns in Homs province, have been liberated by armed residents. In Deraa in the south, several towns have risen against Assad. (Next door, the Druze-dominated Sweida province is already largely autonomous, having <a href="https://qunfuz.com/2023/08/26/revolutionary-resurgence-in-syria/">roundly rejected Assad well over a year ago</a>.) The Turkish-backed National Army, meanwhile, is this morning moving into territory held jointly by the PKK/SDF and the Assad regime in the Tel Rifaat area.
The fact that other parts of Syria are rising, and under different commands, is important because it means HTS influence will be diluted. If several parts of the country are liberated, HTS will have to build a united front with people with other perspectives and political backgrounds.
This doesn’t mean that the democratic revolution is about to seize power, or that Syria is about to enter paradise. The civil revolution that began in 2011 was largely crushed, its experiments in democracy eliminated, its most grassroots military forces co-opted or gobbled up by more powerful and authoritarian actors. There are no longer hundreds of independent, quasi-democratic local councils to organise civil life. The country is divided, traumatised, cursed by warlords and foreign occupiers. 
But suddenly, it looks as if it may be possible not only to challenge but to end the rule of the monster, which means it may become possible for millions to go home, and therefore for civil society to begin to reconstitute itself. The future can’t start until Assad is gone.
Today, the most important events may occur around the city of Hama, where the regime may be able to mobilise fighters based in loyal communities to stage a fightback. If the dominoes continue to fall, I’d expect very fierce fighting in Homs and Damascus, where militarised Alawi communities have been planted in strategic locations precisely for this eventuality.
I also expect all fascist forces regionally and globally to do what they can to stop Syrian self-determination, including the genocidal Zionist state, which Assad father and son have served so well. Israel certainly wishes to crush Hizbullah and the Iranian militia system, but it doesn’t want to unseat the dictatorship <a href="https://qunfuz.com/2023/03/05/palestinian-assadists/">which handed over the Golan</a> and which imprisons teenage girls (like Tal al-Mallouhi) if they write poems about Palestine. 
Already, there are Zionists making noises about the “danger of chemical weapons falling into the hands of jihadists”—people who didn’t worry about chemical weapons in the hands of Assad, who slaughtered thousands of innocents with them, or in the hands of the Iranian militias that are supposedly such a threat to them.
People who still choose to believe that the fascist Assad regime—which murdered tens of thousands of Palestinians, and recently withdrew further from its side of the Golan so that Israel could advance—is “anti-Zionist”, well, I really can’t help them. Freedom for the Syrians from fascism and foreign occupation is a noble aim in itself. So is freedom for the Arabs in general from the dictatorships which abuse them. This is actually a precondition for Palestinian liberation.
But today, it doesn’t matter so much what outsiders think. History is being made on the ground.
First published at <a href="https://qunfuz.com">Qunfuz.com</a>. Robin Yassin-Kassab is the author of <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Road-Damascus-Robin-Yassin-Kassab/dp/0141035641/ref=pd_sxp_grid_i_1_0/275-3026135-7857639">The Road From Damascus</a>, and co-author, with Leila al-Shami, <a href="http://www.plutobooks.com/display.asp?K=9780745336220">Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution and War</a>.

Robin Yassin-Kassab

In Syria, history is being made on the ground

Trump’s victory has sent shock waves through global politics. His far-right government-in-waiting has promised to deport millions of immigrants, block action on climate change, slash and burn social services, further empower the police and more. His administration will be chock filled with billionaires and bigots, and their mission will be to recast the machinery of the US state in their image.
Trump’s foreign policy agenda is less clear. He is without question a champion of US power on the world stage. But he also presents himself as an outsider and a free agent. He likes to dress up his admiration of and dealings with various dictators as an example of peaceful coexistence. He also used his opposition to the Iraq war to attack Hillary Clinton and the Washington establishment back in his first successful presidential run in 2016. 
Trump tried to play the same game with Israel’s war on Gaza. Though a long-time supporter of Israel, he insisted that the current slaughter would never have happened with him in charge. He appealed to those who were rightly furious with the Biden-Harris administration’s support for Israel’s genocide and declared himself a peacemaker. “The Muslim and Arab voters in Michigan and across the country want a stop to the endless wars and a return to peace in the Middle East”, Trump said in a stump speech aimed at Arab and Muslim voters in Michigan. He also repeatedly attacked Harris for her association with the Cheney family, who were central to the so-called “war on terror” that devastated Iraq and Afghanistan for decades. 
This rhetoric resonated with sections of the Arab and Muslim political class. After being invited to join the stage at a Trump campaign event in Michigan, Imam Belal Alzuhairi of the Islamic Center of Detroit explained his support for Trump in simple if deluded terms: “We as Muslims stand with President Trump because he promises peace”. The Yemeni mayor of Hamtramck, the first city in the US to elect an all-Muslim city council and a Muslim mayor, also endorsed Trump. (Others in the Arab and Muslim community, as well as the Palestine Solidarity movement, chose instead to campaign for a boycott or for the Greens’ candidate Jill Stein.)
It is too early to know whether Trump was successful in relating to the small minority of voters motivated by Gaza. On the one hand, the Council on American-Islamic Relations released a set of exit polls that indicated Muslims saw through his cynical appeals. According to <a href="https://www.cair.com/press_releases/cair-exit-poll-of-muslim-voters-reveals-surge-in-support-for-jill-stein-and-donald-trump-steep-decline-for-harris/">this survey</a>, 21 percent of Muslims voted for Trump versus 20 percent for Harris, down from 69 percent who backed Biden in 2020. If their polling is accurate then the story isn’t the small shift of Muslim voters to Trump, but a collapse in their loyalty to the Democratic Party and a concomitant surge in support for Stein, who according to this poll won a staggering 59 percent of Muslim voters. 
Unfortunately, these positive findings are contradicted by other data points. The Associated Press’ VoteCast exit poll found that 63 percent of Muslims voted for Harris, essentially a status quo outcome. Yet the Arab American Institute conducted pre-polling that showed a split of 41 to 40 for Trump and Harris among Arab Americans, a significant shift given that they have typically backed Democratic presidential nominees by substantial margins. The election results from Dearborn, Michigan, the largest majority Arab American city in the US, signalled an even more dramatic shift. There, Trump won 42 percent of the vote compared to 36 for Harris and 18 for Stein, a radical shift from Biden’s 74 to 24 smashing victory over Trump in 2020.
We may never find out just how many Palestine supporters bought Trump’s absurd claim to be a peace candidate, how many voted for him simply to punish the Democrats for their stance on Gaza and how many backed him for other reasons. The issues aren’t easy to disentangle. 
But regardless, the truth is that Trump is just as committed to US imperialism and to Israel as his Democratic predecessors. This has become increasingly clear as he has begun constructing his administration, a who’s who of war hawks, Zionists and far-right freaks. Trump’s Middle East team is arguably even more extreme in its support for Israeli aggression against the people of Palestine, Lebanon and beyond. 
The headline pick is Mike Huckabee as the nominee for US ambassador to Israel. This is a guy who once declared that “There’s really no such thing as a Palestinian”, before conceding a few years later that if these non-existent people insisted on having a country, then it should be constructed on existing Arab territory. He opposes any Palestinian control over land in historic Palestine.
Trump’s proposed defense secretary is Pete Hegseth, a former Fox News host and a current white nationalist. He has built his career by defending US soldiers accused of war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. Hegseth has also advocated the construction of a Jewish temple on the site of the Al-Aqsa Mosque—a position so extreme that even Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu does not support it.
His pick for United Nations ambassador is MAGA hatchet woman Elise Stefanik, who has championed the repression against Palestine solidarity activists across America. Like most supporters of Israel, Stefanik relies heavily on the spurious claim that opposing Israel’s crimes is inherently antisemitic, accusing both student protesters and their targets in university management of this crime. In a recent speech to the pro-Israeli think tank Endowment for Middle East Truth, she declared her task would be to represent Israel’s interests in the “den of antisemitism” that is the UN.
In many cases, these despicable figures will simply be continuing the genocidal policies already established by the Biden administration. For instance, Stefanik’s Democratic predecessor Linda Thomas-Greenfield vetoed four separate motions calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. And while Trump has criticised Biden for not supplying the Israelis with sufficient weaponry, this is purely for show. A <a href="https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/files/cow/imce/papers/2023/2024/Costs%20of%20War_US%20Support%20Since%20Oct%207%20FINAL%20v2.pdf">paper</a>
by the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs estimates that the Israeli war effort has benefited from an unprecedented $22 billion in US aid and related military expenditure in the last fourteen months, supplemented by an additional 100 arms deals too small to require congressional reporting. Through these measures, the Democrats have granted a state carrying out a well-documented genocide the largest military aid package since World War Two.
But this is no reason to shrug our shoulders at the prospect of Trump. The presence of far-right and ultra-Zionist figures in the Trump administration could lead to dramatic new developments and allow Israel even more scope for aggression. During his last administration, Trump led a number of countries in recognising all of Jerusalem as Israeli territory and moved the US embassy to that city for the first time. Like many of Trump’s worst decisions, the construction of a new US embassy on stolen Palestinian land in Jerusalem was upheld by the Biden administration. 
Trump secured peace deals between Israel and a range of regimes in the Middle East and North Africa. While this was a primarily symbolic move by states that in practice had never seriously sought to confront Israel, these deals, grouped under the umbrella of the Abraham Accords, were a substantial diplomatic victory for the Israelis. Trump and his allies now have their sights set on convincing the Saudis to sign on, a move which would largely complete the political isolation of the Palestinian people, further insulating Israel from anything approaching regional opposition.
While nobody who backs Palestine should mourn the defeat of Harris and the Democrats, we cannot be complacent about the incoming Trump administration. Trump and his monstrous cabinet are primed to enable the Israeli far right’s most violent and expansionist policies. We cannot yet know what horrors they will unleash on the people of Palestine, but we know from the past year that the Democratic Party will be no opposition. It will be up to us. 
As well, there will be opportunities to build new alliances with other groups targeted by Trump’s reactionary agenda and relate to the general instability his leadership will generate. Activists and organisers need to be ready to respond and use the widespread revulsion at the monsters taking over the White House to strengthen the movement for justice, peace and liberation in Palestine.

Omar Hassan

Trump lied about peace, but will deliver only misery in Palestine

Joel Geier has been a socialist activist in the US since the civil rights movement in the late 1950s. He has written extensively on US imperialism, politics and economics. He spoke to Red Flag’s Robert Narai. The interview has been edited for length.
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How would you characterise the position of US imperialism today?
The US is still the world’s dominant economic, political and military superpower. But it now faces competition from a newly emerging superpower, China, and its allies. This introduces a new, more dangerous phase of imperialism, which has its roots in preceding phases.
There have been three previous phases of imperialism over the last century or so. First was the struggle for the world market and an international economy that led to World War One, the Great Depression and World War Two, the latter of which the US emerged from on top. It was the strength of US industrial capacity that, converted to war production, produced the planes, ships, tanks, trucks, guns and ammunition that were vital to the Allied victory.
After World War Two, there was superpower competition between the victors of that war: the US and the Soviet Union. This was a political and military struggle without economic rivalry, as the Soviet Union could not compete on the world market. 
The third phase begins at the end of the 1980s. After the collapse and disintegration of the Soviet Union, the US emerged as the world’s only superpower. It used this phase to organise its globalised order under US auspices.
During this time, the US made its greatest strategic gamble and, ultimately, mistake. To gain access to cheaper labour and greater profits, it outsourced its industrial capacity and manufacturing to China and others. The US thought it could incorporate China into the economic world that it controlled. Instead, the US has found itself in the ironic position that it is dependent upon the decisions of the Chinese Communist Party for some of its industrial goods, and even its military is dependent upon parts and supplies from China. The US currently lacks the industrial-military capacity to engage in a major conflict with China. 
There is now an attempt by the US to restore its industrial-military capacity. This requires a major struggle for the world market, raw materials and the military preparations necessary for world domination. This is a new phase of imperialism that has been accelerated by three recent events.
First, the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted US industrial supply chains that were dependent upon China. Manufacturing parts didn’t arrive from China and so sections of manufacturing ground to a halt. Supplies of pharmaceuticals and other medical supplies were dependent upon China. This highlighted to the US ruling class that it could not remain dependent upon China; it was necessary to restore self-reliance to ensure its continued control over the world. 
Second, the Russian invasion of Ukraine convinced sections of the American ruling class that they must control Middle Eastern oil and should not pivot away from this commodity that the US’s allies and rivals depend on.
Third, Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza and Israel’s advance against Iran and its allies in the Middle East—all of which is dependent upon US support—have strengthened the US’s position in the region.
These events have restored or reinforced alliances and the formation of blocs and coalitions over the last few years. The US has used the war in Ukraine to restore its military dominance over NATO and Europe. In Asia, the US has created AUKUS and restored its alliances with the Philippines and cemented ties with South Korea and Japan against China. On the other side, Russia and China have formed an alliance. Both now have ties with Iran, which is supplying military goods to Russia, and North Korea is sending troops to support Russians fighting in Ukraine.
What were US imperial interests in the Middle East prior to the war in Gaza?
The US’s strategic objective for more than 80 years has been to control world oil and to use this leverage over other countries because no modern capitalist economy or military can function without oil. 
During the first half of the twentieth century, the US was the leading oil producer in the world and supplied oil to the Allies that contributed to their victory in World War Two. During the war, the US made an alliance with Saudi Arabia. It created the modern Saudi state and military in order for US oil policy to be supported by Saudi Arabia. And with the decline of British and French imperialism after the war, the US came to dominate the Middle East and Middle Eastern oil. 
The US fought wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to extend its control over Middle Eastern oil. These wars were won militarily but were a disaster from the vantage point of US imperial interests. They cost the US trillions of dollars, thousands of deaths of US soldiers and many tens of thousands of injuries. These were endless wars: they could not control and maintain the occupations they were involved in. This weakened the US’s ability to confront China and so they were determined to pivot away from the Middle East, starting with Obama.
Obama was also the fracking president. He restored oil production in the US, which is now again the leading oil producer in the world. The US no longer depends on oil imports from the Middle East: it is now a net exporter of oil. Biden continued this policy by pulling the last troops out of Afghanistan and scaling down the troops in Iraq to a few thousand.
The US withdrawal from the Middle East created a vacuum that was mainly filled by Iran, which has set up allies in Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Gaza and Yemen. This shifted the balance of forces in the Middle East and created a clash between Saudi Arabia, the UAE and others against Iran. These Arab states wanted the US back in the region as protectors against Iran.
The US also changed its attitude towards the Middle East after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Germany and other EU countries were dependent upon oil and gas from Russia, which made it difficult for the US to organise Europe and NATO against Russia until that question was solved. However, the US and its Arab allies were now in a position to supply oil and natural gas to Germany and others in Europe. 
The war in Ukraine convinced the US that if they are moving towards a conflict with Russia and China, they have to control Middle Eastern oil. They therefore came up with various plans to reorganise the Middle East, the most important of which was an alliance of Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt, Jordan and so on with Israel against Iran and their allies, under US military auspices. This is what was being proposed prior to the war in Gaza. One of the reasons Hamas gave for taking on Israel militarily on 7 October was they wanted to prevent this alliance from taking place. 
How have Israel’s wars against Gaza and Lebanon, as well as their repeated confrontations with Iran, changed the US plans for the Middle East?
The war in Gaza has altered US plans for the Middle East. Although its Arab allies are for an Israeli victory, they cannot openly ally with Israel while the genocide of the Palestinians is taking place, out of fear of how unpopular it would be with their own populations. These plans are either postponed or have to be readjusted when the war ends.
Israel is a close ally of the US: the Israeli military, intelligence services, technology etc. are heavily intertwined with their American equivalents. This has been true for decades. Israel does the dirty work for American imperialism in one country after another throughout the world. When the US do not want to get their hands dirty, they often have the Israelis do it for them.
Israel’s current war could not exist without US-supplied arms, intelligence, technology and so on. The US want an Israeli victory but not a generalised regional war. 
The ongoing support by the US for Israel in this war is not because Netanyahu is smarter than them, or that Biden is a lifelong Zionist, or any of the other reasons the liberal press give that cover up the real nature of US imperialism, which many of them support. They do not want to present the truth: the US is also genocidal, not just Israel. Israel has killed 43,000 people in Gaza. In Vietnam, the US killed between 2 and 3 million civilians. In Iraq, the US killed half a million people, of whom over 200,000 were civilians. It is the US that dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It is the US that firebombed Tokyo, Hamburg and Dresden during World War Two. This is what it takes to become the global superpower.
At the same time, the US does not want the fallout from a genocide against the Palestinians. Politically, it has been a disaster for Israel and the US in parts of the world. And so the US issues press releases to quiet liberal opinion about how terrible it is, that Israel should be giving more humanitarian aid, protecting civilians and so on. At the same time, the US provides Israel with all the support needed to carry out these atrocities. 
Meanwhile, the US has supported Israel’s expansion of the war into Lebanon against Hezbollah and confrontations with Iran.
The US enables Israel—but just as important, Israel is enabling a victory for the US. Unless there is dramatic change in the war, this is becoming the biggest Israeli victory in the Middle East since the 1967 war against the Arab states. It is the biggest US military victory in decades.
Israel enables the US to change the balance of power in the Middle East to the detriment of Iran, which has been rising in importance in the Middle East for the better part of a decade now. This is an enormous shift. It is one that is vital to the US if it is to restore its control over Middle Eastern oil in preparation for bigger conflicts with China and Russia. If the US can control the Middle East, it can control the oil supply from the Middle East to China (even though Russia can provide a large amount of oil for China). This is the long-term goal of US imperialism. 
Israel, with the full support and backing of the US, has inflicted a huge blow against Iran’s allies in Hamas and Hezbollah. It is probably the US that took out the air defences in Syria and Iraq that allowed Israel to get to Iran. Israel has used air power to take out the Iranian air defences. There is total cooperation between the US and Israeli intelligence and military services in carrying out these attacks.
The US has totally decided what Israel could do in terms of Iran. It has protected Israel by providing them with the THAAD defences against Iranian missiles. The US bombed Yemen to send a signal to Iran that the US will take part if they continue to fire missiles at Israel.
The US has told Israel that it would not go to war against Iran and has refused to allow Israel to bomb Iranian nuclear facilities. The US refused to provide Israel with the necessary equipment: bunker buster bombs necessary to take out their nuclear facilities or the B-52 bombers that deliver them. It has not allowed Israel to target Iran’s oil infrastructure. Iran said if Israel takes out Iranian oil, Iran will take out oil in Saudi Arabia and the UAE. 
The US also leaked the Israeli war plans to Iran. This is something that is not usually done among allies. The US have also been negotiating with the Iranians publicly and behind closed doors. If the US was for Israel bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities and oil infrastructure, it would have happened. 
At this point, the US attitude has been, We will protect and support our ally Israel, but we will not allow this to become a war against Iran. 
The US demanded and got compliance from Israel that US national interests were to be decisive—not Israeli war ones—in the confrontation with Iran.
Israel might do some things that make it difficult for the US to carry out their political objectives for the region. But this is a fight among friends. Despite whatever headaches the Israelis might give them, this is providing the US with the biggest military victory that it has had in decades after winning militarily in Iraq and Afghanistan but losing the occupation.
This has been a cheap war for the US so far. The US spent US$2-4 trillion on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and from the strategic vantage point of US imperialism, they were a disaster. The US has spent US$20 billion on Israel in the past year and achieved its biggest military victory in the region in decades by pushing back Iran and its allies. 
There were several thousand American soldiers killed in those wars and many tens of thousands injured. This victory is taking place without one American soldier being killed or injured and no political blow-back at home for these causalities. It is a very cheap victory for the US.
As this war has shifted from Gaza to include Lebanon and Iran, the left is finally starting to wake up to the idea that the US may be doing more than just enabling Israel. Israel is enabling a victory for the US to restore its power in the Middle East. This victory also pushes back China and Russia, which are allied with Iran. 
What implications does the election of Donald Trump have?
The new Trump presidency will not be a repeat of his first administration. The new phase of imperialism we have entered will accelerate even more with Trump in power. We are in a very different world because of the war in Ukraine and the Middle East, supply chains that must be uncoupled, of the new alliances and bloc formations taking shape.
The foreign policy of the US will not be the ruling-class foreign-policy establishment political strategy pursued by Biden, of managing the status quo of a US-dominated world order. Trump and Republican imperialist foreign policy is to change the world order. It is divided about how to pursue that.
The Trump administration includes both wings of the Republican Party. The traditional Republican hawks generally supported Biden’s foreign policy of restoring American alliances, but criticised him for not being aggressive enough: the US provided weapons to Ukraine but didn’t deliver the weapons that it needed and did not allow Ukraine to use them against Russia. These Republican hawks also criticise the US for holding back Israel against Iran. 
But the greater section of the China hawks—Trump and his associates who now dominate the Republican Party—argue that the US does not have the resources to effectively intervene everywhere in the world: they have to concentrate on China. Despite what Trump and the liberal media say, they are not going to dissolve NATO. Europe is militarily dependent on the US, and NATO is a key pillar of US domination over Europe. Instead, Trump argues that the Europeans have to deal with Russia and make it their responsibility. And he wants to end the Ukraine war and its costs to US imperialism. Trump doesn’t step back in terms of the Middle East because Israel is restoring US power in the Middle East against Iran. 
Trump’s strategy is “make America great again”, to rebuild American economic industrial and military power so that it is capable of preparing for competition and war with China.
Trump has presented this mainly in terms of a trade war against China and if necessary whole sections of the world in order to restore US competitiveness and industry. This is part of what the stock rally was about when he got elected. The capitalist class expects there to be an enormous boom under Trump, who will do away with as many regulations as possible.
The other aspect of Trump’s policy is to quickly raise the war budget from 3 percent of GDP to 5 percent to US$1-1.5 trillion annually. 
Deregulation and lower corporate taxes will be used to try to unleash a new trickle-down scheme that aims to convince US corporations to rebuild the military-industrial complex. 
Biden made a small gesture in that regard with infrastructure and the subsidies for electric vehicles. Trump will make more moves to re-shore production to the US mainland.
Trump’s strategy has been primarily that of a trade war than can threaten the entire world economy through economic nationalism and economic warfare. 
We are in a world in which imperialism threatens not just war but total economic instability. We are entering a whole new period that can produce crises. Both of wars like Gaza and Ukraine. There can be even bigger ones coming. And alongside it there is the threat of economic instability as the US and China attempt to separate and become self-reliant. As these great powers attempt to uncouple from each other, we are back in a world that existed before World War Two. 
What are the tasks for socialists in this new era of imperialism?
Revolutionary socialists, like everyone else, have to face reality, draw conclusions and act on them. We have to understand that the decades of globalisation and one superpower, however bad that was, are now over, and that we are in transition to a more unstable, volatile, dangerous world. A world that threatens economic warfare that impacts on people’s daily living standards, as well as more wars that could culminate in a struggle between the superpowers for world domination. 
Imperialism and war radicalised generations throughout the twentieth century. They created an international movement and led to revolutions—from Russia in 1905 to Portugal in 1975. This new phase of imperialism has the potential to do that again. During previous decades, consciousness of imperialism, war and revolution practically disappeared, even in most sections of the left. We are starting again almost from scratch. In the twentieth century, imperialism and war also created vicious, right-wing and fascist movements. A more aggressive far-right, nationalist movement is under way internationally. 
In the last year, the war in Gaza has produced a new international movement in support of Palestine. It is centred on a new generation of young people opposed to war and its horrors who, like all newly radicalised people, do not have consciousness of imperialism or revolution, but who are suspicious, if not outright hostile, to their rulers, who have excused and supported genocide. Like all new generations, it will take time and experience of struggle for this consciousness to reach radical and revolutionary conclusions. But it is the key question: how to raise the consciousness of people who have been moved by war in the last year to the road of the socialist struggle against imperialism; how to raise their consciousness through struggles, battles, including ideological ones, to win them to the conclusions of the socialist struggle against imperialism and war. We have to win them to internationalism, to support all the struggles of workers, students and the oppressed against all the ruling classes in the world, that the struggle against imperialism and war have to be connected to the struggles against exploitation and oppression. It is a long struggle in front of us. But it is essential we build a much larger and stronger revolutionary organisation committed to this goal.

Robert Narai

US imperialism and the war for the Middle East

Simone McDonnell

Israel’s war on Lebanon: ‘a mortal threat to the whole region’

How can the devastating cycle of imperialist invasions, genocide, exploitation and authoritarian rule that has been inflicted on the people of the Middle East be ended? There is profound sympathy among the workers and the poor of the Arab world for the Palestinian cause, but the brutal dictators who rule Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Syria have held popular mobilisations in check. There is a burning need for a socialist left that can galvanise the masses into action.
The Arab Spring revolution that swept the region just over a decade ago showed the potential for rebellion against these detested regimes. But today the region’s once powerful left is very weak because of the disastrous failure of the Stalinism that long dominated its politics.
If a socialist left is to be built with some hope of liberating the workers of the Middle East and winning freedom for the Palestinian people, then it is vital to come to terms with the legacy of Stalinist class-collaborationist politics and rebuild on a genuinely revolutionary basis.
Prior to the 1930s, the Arab Communist parties were tiny. In the early 1930s, the original Communist leaders, who were genuine working-class revolutionaries, were purged and the parties thoroughly Stalinised. New leaders trained in Moscow loyally carried out the dictates of Russian foreign policy—the policy of the counter-revolutionary regime that had destroyed workers’ power in Russia.
The last thing Russia’s rulers wanted were workers’ revolutions that would threaten their imperialist interests. For Stalin and his supporters, the role of Arab Communists was to find allies for Russia, not to advance working-class interests.
From the mid-1930s, Moscow directed Communists to adopt a class-collaborationist popular front policy that subordinated the interests of workers and peasants to the supposedly progressive national bourgeoisie. As the Syrian Communist leader Khalid Bakdash put it in 1943: 
“We assure the national capitalist, the national factory owner, that we do not look with envy or with malice on his national enterprise. On the contrary, we desire his progress and vigorous growth ... We assure the owner of land that we do not and shall not demand the confiscation of his property ... All we ask is kindness towards the peasant.”
This approach totally contradicted the genuine Marxist tradition. Compare Bakdash’s statement with what Lenin argued about how revolutionaries should relate to their local capitalists in 1920: “The Communist International must enter into a temporary alliance with bourgeois democracy in colonial countries, but must not merge with it and must under all circumstances preserve the independence of the proletarian movement, even if in its most rudimentary form”.
The precise form of the popular front varied over time, and the section of the bourgeoisie that was considered progressive could also change dramatically. During World War Two, Moscow told Arab Communists to back the war effort of Stalin’s British allies. Consequently, Communists opposed strikes by workers. And in the eyes of the Stalinists, the bourgeois Arab forces that continued to support the struggle against British and French colonial rule went from being progressive allies to outright fascists.
Later, the main task was to curry favour with the new nationalist Arab regimes. Moscow spelt it out in 1960:
“At the head of the majority of new national states ... stand bourgeois political leaders ... However, this cannot belittle the progressive historical importance of the breakthrough that has taken place ... [T]he central task ... remains for a comparatively long period of time that of struggle not against capital but against survivals of the Middle Ages. From this stems the possibility of the cooperation over a long period of the workers, peasants and intelligentsia ... with that part of the national bourgeoisie which is interested in the independent political and economic development of its country and is ready to defend its independence against any encroachments by the imperialist powers.”
But no section of the Arab bourgeoisie, even supposedly radical leaders like Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi, was prepared to mobilise the masses for a determined fight against imperialism. In June 1969, Gaddafi opposed a popular war of liberation to free Palestine. He argued that the Palestinian guerrilla movement must rid itself of “ideologies” and operate only according to the strategy laid down by Arab governments.
The popular front approach had an incredibly damaging impact. It led to repeated defeats for the working-class movement. In Iraq following the popular revolution of July 1958 that overthrew the monarchy, the Communists built mass working-class support and dominated the student movement. But despite intensified repression, the Iraqi Communist Party tailed behind the government of General Kassem, which supposedly represented the “national bourgeoisie”. The failure to mobilise workers to fight for power led to a crushing defeat, with at least 5,000 Communists murdered and thousands more sacked from their jobs and sent to prison by the lorry load.
The Communists learned nothing from this disaster. In the 1970s, Iraqi Communist Party members took cabinet posts in the authoritarian Ba’athist government until Saddam Hussein had them hanged.
In Egypt, the Communists initially denounced Abdul Nasser’s nationalist regime as “fascist” after it executed striking workers. But once Nasser developed friendly relations with Moscow, the Communists became cheerleaders for his regime despite the fact Nasser was imprisoning Communist Party leaders. The Egyptian Communists eventually dissolved their party into the highly authoritarian ruling party.
In Lebanon during the civil war of the 1970s and 1980s, the Communists refused to establish democratic control by workers over the sectors of Beirut the party’s armed wing dominated, instead tailing behind the bourgeois nationalist forces. They even went so far as to adopt communalist slogans that served to divide the working class. In Syria, the Communists were absorbed into the Assad regime’s totalitarian state apparatus, occupying minor cabinet posts. This disoriented the working-class movement, tying it to the exploiters and impeding the possibility of independent working-class actions to defend living standards and democratic rights.
Despite these repeated failures, popular-front-style class-collaborationist politics rather than clear-cut class politics in one form or another remained hegemonic on the Arab left for decades. In Palestine, the popular front approach meant that in the Arab revolt of 1936 to 1939, the Palestine Communist Party (PCP) was unable to offer a class-struggle alternative to the reactionary Arab leadership of landlords and clerics. And because the PCP abandoned class politics for nationalism, it was in a weaker position to hold the line against Zionism among its Jewish worker members (who were a majority of members in the 1930s).
The end result was the formation of two Communist parties in British mandate Palestine. One party, predominantly Jewish in composition, tailed Zionism. The other party, predominantly Palestinian in composition, tailed Arab nationalism.
In 1947, Moscow backed the setting up of the Zionist state as it saw Israel as a potential ally. This had a disastrous impact on Communist parties throughout the Arab world.
The membership of the joint Communist Party of Syria and Lebanon, which had built substantial support during a postwar strike wave, collapsed from 18,000 in 1947 to just a few hundred. Dissidents who opposed Moscow’s pro-Zionist line were expelled. Consequently, Communists were in no position to take advantage of the wave of strikes and protests that rocked Syria after the failure of the Arab regimes to defend Palestine. 
The Communists were discredited for many years among Palestinians driven from their land. This explains why the Palestinian left that developed in the 1960s, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestinian (PFLP) and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP), were not direct descendants of the old PCP, but had quite different origins.
The tragedy was that when these groups groped towards Marxism, the predominant ideas on offer were still those of Stalinism. They ended up embracing a popular front approach, as reflected in the names of their organisations, and with all the same problems.
The official Communist Party did retain some influence among Arabs within the state of Israel. It was, however, a reformist party committed to the Zionist state. And the PCP on the West Bank was a conservative force promoting a two-state solution.
The new Palestinian left of the 1960s originated in the Arab National Movement (ANM), which originated among a group of intellectuals at the American University of Beirut, the most prominent of whom were George Habash and Wadi Haddad. The ANM was a highly secretive organisation that had an elitist approach of armed struggle by small bands of guerrillas. It viewed armed actions as a means to pressure the Arab states to launch a war against Israel.
In its early years, the ANM was conservative politically and, reflecting the upper-middle-class social backgrounds of its members, hostile to working-class politics, which it viewed as disrupting Arab national unity. After 1957, the ANM looked to Nasser’s regime in Egypt to unite the Arab world and drive out the imperialists and Zionists.
The crushing defeat of the Arab armies in the 1967 war with Israel discredited Nasserism. The ANM condemned Nasser’s regime as petty bourgeois rather than socialist and began to look to the Vietnamese model. In December 1967, George Habash established the PFLP based on a version of Stalinised Marxism looking to Cuba and China. Then in February 1969, the Democratic Front split from the PFLP. 
Initially, the Democratic Front, influenced by New Left ideas and with a following among Palestinian students in Europe and the US, was the more leftish and open group. Some Palestinian Trotskyists exiled in Europe joined. The Democratic Front strongly rejected Arab chauvinism (and slogans such as drive the Jews into the sea, which was still influential in the 1960s) and placed less emphasis on militarism than the PFLP, which in 1969 and 1970 engaged in a series of plane hijackings and hostage takings.
The DFLP called for the “establishment of a democratic state in which Arabs and Jews shall enjoy equal national rights and responsibilities”
as part of a federal socialist state of the whole region. It sought links with the Israeli Trotskyist group Matzpen. 
In 1970, during the mass upheavals in Jordan, both the DFLP and the PFLP raised the slogan “All power to the resistance” and called for a socialist state. But after the Black September crushing of the resistance, the DFLP moved to the right, purging its more left-wing members and moving towards a more pro-Moscow orientation.
This explains why the DFLP, which had participated in the Left Front in the Lebanese civil war and had been critical of the PLO’s failure to launch an all-out struggle against the far-right Lebanese forces, largely dropped out of the fighting once Russia’s ally Syria invaded Lebanon. The main game for Moscow was its relationship with Arab regimes like Syria. That meant that the interests of Arab and Palestinian Communists were always going to be sacrificed.
The Russians were also keen to develop a relationship with Fatah, the mainstream leadership of the PLO. From the late 1970s, the Russians gave the group substantial funding and arms. Consequently, a strong pro-Moscow Stalinist current developed within Fatah.
The DFLP began to popularise the idea of a Palestinian mini-state in the Occupied Territories. By the early 1970s, sections of the Fatah leadership supported the idea but faced opposition within their ranks, so they were happy for the DFLP to be the stalking horse for the idea.
The DFLP was smaller than the PFLP and had less of a base in the refugee camps. But it had an ideological impact on left-wing intellectual circles in the Arab world. In the early 1970s, it published an influential weekly paper in Beirut with the Lebanese Communist Action Organisation. This enabled it to play an important role in rallying sections of the secular Arab intelligentsia to support a two-state position. It was a slippery slope. The end result was that the DFLP became little more than a left cover for Fatah’s betrayals. 
The PFLP was hostile to “Arab reaction”, represented in its view by feudalism and capitalism, particularly the rulers of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States and Jordan. But it was much less critical of the supposed radical Arab regimes such as Algeria, South Yemen, Syria and, at times, Iraq.
In March 1969, George Habash attacked the DFLP as suffering from “infantile leftism”. “We are not as against Arab regimes as they are”, he argued. “We criticise but collaborate with Arab regimes, as Mao did with the Kuomintang against the Japanese threat in China.”
But so-called radical regimes like Algeria, Syria and Iraq were far from reliable allies of the Palestinian masses. Their approach was not qualitatively different from that of Jordan, Egypt or Saudi Arabia. By tying themselves to these regimes, the PFLP downplayed the need to build a mass revolutionary movement from below throughout the Arab world. The PFLP ended up providing left cover for regimes like the Ba’ath in Iraq and Syria.
So, while the PFLP called itself Marxist-Leninist and talked a lot about the role of the masses and the working class, this became little more than a rhetorical incantation as it sought alliances with various non-proletarian forces.
In 1970, Habash went to China and North Korea to win support, and the Chinese began to send the PFLP considerable amounts of arms. But this was at a cost, as the Chinese opposed the PFLP’s attacks on conservative Arab regimes in Jordan and Saudi Arabia, with which China was trying to curry favour.
After the defeat of the Arab states in the 1973 war with Israel, Yasser Arafat openly backed the proposal for a Palestinian mini-state in the Occupied Territories. In response, the PFLP and other groups formed the Rejection Front, which was also backed by the Iraqi regime.
Opposition to a mini-state had a resonance among intellectuals and students and in some refugee camps in Lebanon (after all, the refugees would get nothing out of setting up a state in the Occupied Territories). However, by 1978 Iraq was moving to cosy up to the conservative Arab regimes and it consequently went cold on the Rejection Front, which went into a marked decline.
Despite tensions and battles with Fatah, the PFLP refused to break decisively with the Fatah-dominated PLO and called for the national unity of all Palestinian groups. In other words, despite declaring itself a Marxist-Leninist organisation, the PFLP consistently put nation before class. It sought to unite with the bourgeois-dominated Fatah rather than build a class-struggle alternative to Fatah’s betrayals of Palestinian workers and peasants.
The PFLP came to operate as a ginger group within the PLO rather than trying to build a clear socialist leadership alternative to Fatah. This led the PFLP, on several occasions, to fudge its opposition to official PLO policy in the interests of preserving national unity. 
Eventually, the PFLP toned down its opposition to a two-state solution. It came to accept it as inevitable, and when the Palestinian Authority was established, it chose to operate within its framework.
The failure of the PFLP, the DFLP and the official Communist parties to build a class-struggle alternative to the rightward-moving Fatah demoralised their supporters. The demoralisation was further compounded by the collapse of the Russian bloc, which all of the Arab left had mistakenly looked to as socialist. 
This opened the space for the rise of the Islamists, who cohered around them a new generation of Palestinians who wanted to fight. But the Islamists were incapable of offering a road forward and, just like Fatah, led the Palestinian people down the road to further defeats.
A new revolutionary left needs to be built in Palestine and the broader Arab world that bases itself on a clear rejection of all forms of alliances with capitalist forces. A left that puts working-class unity ahead of national unity. A left that has no truck with any of the Arab regimes, whether so-called progressive or reactionary. A left that fights for working-class leadership of the struggle against Zionism and imperialism. One that seeks to rally the urban poor, the peasantry and the refugees behind the working class and recognises that freedom for the Palestinian people can be won only by a socialist revolution that sweeps away both the Zionist state and the bourgeois Arab states.

Mick Armstrong

The terrible legacy of Stalinism in the Middle East

Israel’s US-sponsored genocide in Palestine has now brought the Middle East to the brink of regional catastrophe. But if you open up a newspaper in the West, you’ll read that the only nuclear-armed power in the Middle East is the victim of aggression from its neighbours, including one it has just invaded for the fourth time. And while Israel is doing nothing but “defending itself”, its regional rival Iran is being painted as enemy number one. 
The irony is that Iran was once a vital US ally in the Middle East. The post-WW2 period was a golden age of US influence in Iran, during which control over the spigot of Iranian oil was transferred from the British to the US empire. 
In 1953, the US sponsored a coup against progressive nationalist Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh to prevent the nationalisation of Iranian oilfields. In the following decade, Iran became increasingly authoritarian. The anti-communist and pro-Western king, or shah, was a welcome friend to the US in an era when pan-Arab nationalism was threatening US interests in the Arab states. 
In 1979, a revolution swept aside the hated shah. The revolution, which had opened up the possibility of liberation for workers, women and oppressed minorities, was ultimately hijacked by the clerics, who implemented a new authoritarian state, the Islamic Republic. Unlike the previous autocracy, this regime did not ally with US imperialism, instead presenting itself as intractably hostile to US influence in the Middle East. 
Iran’s anti-Western posture has given a measure of popularity to an otherwise despised regime. And no wonder, given the US has long been the greatest purveyor of violence and instability in the Middle East. 
As a rival capitalist power, Iran has benefited from anti-US feeling and from the US’s strategic failures in the region, particularly during the “War on Terror”. Iran’s major rival, the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, was removed from power by the US in 2003, and Iran was able to take advantage of the power vacuum created when the US proved unable to establish a pro-Western government. 
Iran’s regional influence was also boosted by the defeat of Israel in Lebanon by Hezbollah, an independent militia strategically allied to Iran, following Israel’s invasion in 2006. In the wake of the Arab Spring revolutions of 2011, Iran also carried out military interventions to prop up Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad with the support of Hezbollah, and sponsored the Houthis in Yemen against local forces and a Saudi-led coalition of Gulf states. 
Renewed Iranian influence has presented a strategic dilemma for US imperialism. In the last 15 years, there has been debate in the US ruling class about whether confrontation or containment is the best approach. The Obama-era Iran nuclear deal signed in 2015 represented a pragmatic response to the failure of US occupations in the Middle East. The deal sought to balance overwhelming US military superiority and deterrence with a partial loosening of sanctions on Iran in exchange for a commitment to end Iran’s nuclear weapons program. The motivation for the deal was hardly peacenik: Obama was attempting to tie up loose ends in the Middle East the better to carry out a “pivot to Asia” and prepare for war with China. 
In the intervening years, Trump tore up the nuclear deal and carried out the assassination of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani in 2020. Aside from plying their ally Israel with weapons and levelling ever greater sanctions on Iran’s economy, the US has not had a coherent strategy for confronting or containing Iran. 
There is no shortage of anti-Iranian hawks in the US today. When asked in an interview with 60 Minutes what country represents the “greatest adversary” to the US, Democratic Party presidential candidate Kamala Harris claimed that Iran was the “obvious” answer. At a campaign event in North Carolina, Donald Trump encouraged Israel to strike Iranian territory to “hit the nuclear first and worry about the rest later”.
And while there are no doubt differences of opinion in the US elite about Israeli strikes on Iran—whether to avoid hitting oil infrastructure, which would risk destabilising oil prices, and whether to avoid attacks on nuclear facilities, for example—if Israel decides to strike, the US will back it. 
It is absurd to suggest today, as so many in Israel and the West do, that Iran is an existential threat to Israel. The opposite is true. Israel has never been more secure. The Gulf states have all but normalised relations, Egypt maintains the barbaric blockade on the Rafah crossing into Gaza, and Jordan shoots down Iranian rockets to defend Israel. Israel, on the other hand, poses an existential threat to any neighbour that finds itself at odds with US imperialism. 
A comparison of their military capacities and security alliances shows a stark gulf between them. Israel is a rich, nuclear-armed power with the backing of US imperialism and spends nearly three times Iran’s annual military budget. Iran is a relatively weak power, strained under the weight of crippling US sanctions. This is not the clashing of two comparable powers but an attempt to assert full spectrum US and Israeli dominance in the Middle East, which should be resolutely opposed. If war emerges between Israel, backed by the US, and Iran, socialists should be for Israel’s defeat.
Iran’s government is an authoritarian capitalist regime that brutally oppresses its own population. Animosity from the US and Israel does not make it progressive. The anti-government protests and strikes that accompanied the Women, Life, Freedom movement in 2022 were a positive development that required solidarity. Opposition to an attack on Iran, and the desire to see Israel roundly defeated, does not reflect political support for the Iranian regime, just as opposition to the invasion of Iraq in 2003 did not imply support for Saddam Hussein. 
Now as then, anti-war activists in the West have a responsibility to reject the lies and expose the hypocrisy of Israel and the West’s wars—current and threatened—in the Middle East.

Chloe Rafferty

How Iran became Western enemy number one

The children of the stones 
have scattered our papers 
spilled ink on our clothes 
mocked the banality of old texts ... 
What matters about 
the children of the stones 
Is that they have brought us rain after centuries of thirst 
Brought us the sun after centuries of darkness, 
Brought us hope after centuries of defeat ... 
The most important 
thing about them is that they have rebelled 
against the authority of their fathers.
Nizar Qabbani—Syrian poet
The First Intifada was one of the deepest and longest-lasting rebellions of Palestinians against Israeli oppression in history. It was known as the “uprising of stones”. 
The emblematic figure of the Intifada was the youth, hurling rocks, head covered by a keffiyeh, standing defiant against Israeli tanks. This figure represented a break from the militarised forms of Palestinian resistance that had dominated in the late 1960s and early ’70s. The Intifada involved hundreds of thousands of Palestinians living in the West Bank, Gaza and even inside Israel, and represented a broad and deep radicalisation of the Palestinian population. It involved resistance, civil disobedience, strikes and protests. 
Stories from journalists at the time reveal the breadth of popular involvement. American Ramallah-based journalist Joe Stork described how a middle-aged working-class woman, after watching demonstrations on television for a month, eagerly joined a group of young boys building a roadblock. 
Another article described a toothless 100-year-old woman admitted to a Gaza hospital after having her hand broken by Israeli soldiers. As she entered the ward, she sat up on the bed and gave a speech of defiance to the applause of other victims in surrounding beds.
Over the course of the six years, there were times when the Intifada managed to achieve something like dual power. Palestinian popular committees took over significant elements of civil society and social infrastructure. This was all in response to increased Israeli control and brutalisation of Palestinians in the preceding decades.
After Israel occupied Gaza and the West Bank following the 1967 war, the intensification of military rule became unbearable. These conditions provoked extreme resentment amongst the Palestinians, and, throughout the 1970s and early ’80s, there was an increase in organisation. Students played a leading role, with universities starting community programs and organising protests. Strikes began to occur with greater frequency as all Palestinian factions turned toward organising workers. 
The immediate event that sparked the Intifada occurred in Gaza on 9 December 1987. An Israeli army tank drove into a line of cars of Arab workers who had just passed one of the military checkpoints at the northern entrance to the Gaza Strip. Four were crushed to death and seven were seriously injured. The crime was witnessed by hundreds of labourers returning from jobs in Israel. 
Three of the dead men were from the nearby Jabalia refugee camp. Their funerals turned into a huge demonstration of 10,000 camp residents. From this moment onwards, the residents of the camp referred to it as the “camp of the revolution”. 
The killings sparked waves of similar actions across the refugee camps, home to the poorest and most oppressed Palestinians. One young resident in Gaza said: “We were waiting to do such an uprising. Everyone here has a demonstration inside their heart”. 
The insurgence of the early demonstrations provoked a violent reaction from the Israeli military. Hundreds of young people were arbitrarily arrested. The military picked them up and imprisoned them. Eventually, the Israelis converted an army camp on the edge of Gaza city into a new place to hold young men. Palestinians dubbed it “Ansar II” after the notorious POW camp Israel set up in southern Lebanon. Ansar II became infamous for its sadistic treatment of Palestinians, which included clubbing prisoners while they were shackled to the ground. 
Curfews were introduced; telephone lines, water and electricity were cut. Administrative detention was introduced, and activists were deported. 
By 1988, Israel was sending 10,000 troops every day into the West Bank and Gaza, using more soldiers than in their conquest in 1967. By the end of 1988, more than 30,000 Palestinians had been detained and hundreds killed.
This initial phase of the uprising was primarily a war of the camps versus the army, but by mid-January 1988, the villages also became centres of resistance. Women and the young were at the centre of the rebellion. There were stories about boys, so young that they had to stand on their tiptoes to look through car windows, staffing the Palestinian checkpoints established by the uprising. Women routinely attacked Israeli patrols with pots and pans to release detained youths. Outside one Ramallah prison in late 1988, three women claimed an arrested youth, explaining: “They are all our sons”. This phrase became a refrain throughout the whole of the Intifada. Women even talked about protecting their “sons” as their profession. 
All this resistance would have been significant enough, but the rebellion deepened and expanded in a variety of ways. Tax strikes were organised and Israeli goods boycotted.
Importantly, workers began to mobilise. Over the decades, the numbers of Palestinian workers working low-wage jobs in the West Bank and as day labourers inside Israel had increased. Wage workers became a larger part of the Palestinian population overall, and unions grew. One union official estimated in 1985 that, out of 150,000 workers in the West Bank, around 30,000 were members of a union. 
Strikes became a regular feature of the Intifada. In late December 1987, a general strike of Palestinian workers occurred across all the Occupied Territories. Israeli profits collapsed in a variety of sectors, including hospitality, construction and fruit farming. 
The organisation of workers was not, however, unified. There were several union federations and blocs organised along political lines—many of whom were competing for members. 
Other committees were also established: youth committees, medical committees, popular and neighbourhood committees, and local defence committees.
The neighbourhood and popular committees became responsible for the running of basic infrastructure, including health, education and rubbish collection. When schools were shut down by military order, the committees established alternative schools with a whole new curriculum. 
These committees did more than help organise different elements of society. They started to give political and social confidence in new ways. Many of the generational and class relations were shifting. The class forces that had dominated society, like intellectuals and professionals, began to seem marginal. There were open challenges to old leaders and old hierarchies. 
The idea behind many of these committees was to disengage from existing Israeli structures and lay the basis for Palestinian statehood. Or, according to Salim Tamari, “To prepare the Occupied Territories to receive the national authority.” 
While the early months of the Intifada were led by a combination of local spontaneous action and pre-existing formations, a more formal political leadership coalesced in early 1988. This was called the Unified National Leadership of the Uprising (UNLU). Outside of the UNLU, and with growing influence, were the Islamist factions: Islamic Jihad and Hamas. 
The UNLU directed the course of the uprising through a series of communiqués. These communiqués, particularly in the early years of the uprising, would give each day of the week ahead a particular focus. They were distributed at night, on the ground or tucked under car windshields or doors. The directives were assiduously followed. 
The UNLU comprised both a political leadership on the ground in the Occupied Territories and also the leadership amongst the diaspora. The diasporic leadership developed a broader strategic orientation. The early articulated goals of the movement were to hold an international peace conference that could push for the establishment of a Palestinian state.
The UNLU was mainly run by the organisations affiliated with the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO). This included the increasingly dominant Fateh, led by Yasser Arafat. Fateh was a compromised and conservative nationalist organisation. Its horizons were shaped simultaneously by its cosy relationships with despotic regional powers and a desire for a Palestinian mini-state. The other main factions were the Maoist-influenced leftist organisations of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP) and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). Later, the Communist Party joined. 
All these factions organised their own committees and trade unions. While there were often sharp disagreements between the factions on a range of questions, all held to a generally nationalist framework. In the unions, this meant that the class struggle should be frozen in the interests of a “nationalist alliance” between workers and bosses in the Occupied Territories. An independent Palestinian state needed to be established before the class struggle could begin. Such a political approach meant that, although the unions were a vital element of the Intifada, the workers movement did not fundamentally shape the political contours of the popular committees. This was a missed opportunity. By the end of the first year of the Intifada, there was such a consensus that the popular committees were the basis for a Palestinian state that there may well have been room to argue that an expanded and deepened version of popular power, workers power, was necessary. 
But even if such a view was in a minority, it was the right argument to make. National independence, while important, does not bring genuine liberation for the nationally oppressed working class. Indeed, twentieth century postcolonial states have often become hell-scapes for workers. Workers needed to fight for the struggle for national independence to become a struggle for socialism.
The Intifada inspired other regional uprisings in Algeria, Jordan and the Gulf States. These rebellions weren’t just in solidarity with Palestine: they challenged the regional order. This was something that the Fateh leadership could not countenance. So much of their existence and power was dependent on funding and support from these regimes. They began to codify a policy of “non-interference” in the affairs of the Arab regimes.
The resilience of the popular movement was also considered potentially problematic by the Fateh leadership. While Fateh understood the popular committees as providing the infrastructure for a future Palestinian state, they did not approve of their radicalising dynamic. Fateh saw the mass movement only as a lever for its own power plays. 
In the wake of the Intifada, the Israeli and US ruling classes felt that they were unable to continue ruling in the old way. Much better to find a collaborationist Palestinian leadership. Fateh happily obliged, thus beginning the disastrous Oslo Accords that ended in the establishment of the traitorous Palestinian Authority. 
Both the DFLP and the PFLP, in differing ways and at different paces, challenged elements of this trajectory, while nevertheless maintaining their fundamental commitment to the PLO and its institutions. Hamas and Islamic Jihad, on the other hand, maintained a strident objection to the notion of a Palestinian mini-state, and this objection stood them in good stead for the later betrayals. 
At the same time, between 1991 and 1993, the Israeli arrest and killing campaigns eliminated many leading activists. This repression occurred while Fateh was deliberately fragmenting the movement. Arafat allocated PLO funds to institutions and personnel according to political loyalty, much to the detriment of genuine resistance activities. These two factors ultimately contributed to the decline of the mass character of the Intifada.
Tragically, the promise of the Intifada was lost. It was crushed by an Israeli state that was determined to continue its rule over the Palestinians in whatever way it could, by violence and
negotiation. 
The Intifada was also betrayed by a Palestinian leadership that preferred to chase the dream of a Palestinian capitalist state in which its own power and prestige would be safeguarded. Finally, all that brilliant defiant energy was squandered by a left that refused to try to carve out a different, more radical path: a path that was certainly more difficult, but that centred working-class resistance in the Occupied Territories, that argued for regional revolution and looked to the power of the masses rather than the power of states.

Vashti Fox

Sun after darkness: The First Intifada

Jerome Small

What’s driving Israel’s wars?

Israeli soldiers describe the Zionist state’s vast network of prisons as “hell”. In them, at least 9,600 Palestinians are held hostage, almost half of whom were detained “without trial, without being presented with the allegations against them, and without access to the right to defend themselves”, according to a report published in August by Israel-based human rights organisation B’Tselem. 
Welcome to Hell: The Israeli Prison System as Network of Torture contains 55 testimonies from Palestinians released since 7 October. Despite their being only a fraction of the imprisoned population, their stories shine light on a brutal apparatus of physical and psychological terror designed in every facet to crush the Palestinian people. 
Since 7 October, Israel’s prison system has operated under a “prison state of emergency”. Even the most basic inmate rights—such as the right to speak to a lawyer and family—have been stripped away. 
Accounts of beatings at the hands of guards and mauling by dogs come up again and again in the report. And some 60 Palestinians have been killed in custody in the past year. Take the case of Arafat Hamdan, a diabetic held in Ofer Prison in the West Bank. When his health rapidly deteriorated, his cellmates called guards for help. 
“The guard said Arafat needed food and drink, and I told him we had nothing to feed him. He said to wait for breakfast”, Muhammad Srur, a 34-year-old father of two from the West Bank village of Ni’lin, recounted. But by breakfast, Arafat was dead.
Israel’s torture regime is designed to degrade and humiliate to a level of detail so sophisticated that only the cruellest mind could have conceived it. 
Twelve to fourteen prisoners are crammed into cells designed for six. Prisoners are forced to eat spoiled food. One testimony describes having only six slices of bread to eat per day. Another relates how they were forced to eat mouldy yoghurt. 
“For 191 days, I didn’t see the sun”, Thaer Halahleh recounts. 
Sami Khalili, who spent twenty years in Israel’s prisons, had letters from his late mother confiscated. Olive oil and spices that he and his fellow inmates had previously used to cook for themselves were destroyed. Routinely, guards attempt to force Palestinians to kiss the Israeli flag or sing Zionist songs. Refusal, the response of many, is met with hails of fists and batons. 
“Once, when a detainee in the cell next to ours asked to swap his yogurt because the expiration date had passed, they punished all the inmates in the cell: they set dogs on them, beat them with clubs, dragged them to the bathroom and beat them up”, Hisham Saleh recounted. “The next day, I could still see their blood on the floor.”
Long before the “prison state of emergency”, the carceral system had been a pillar of apartheid. Before Israel’s genocidal campaign began last year, 5,192 Palestinians languished in the regime’s vast prison network. Israel employs a series of categories to imprison Palestinians without even a pretence of due process. Administrative detention is one of the most notorious. Human rights group Amnesty International defines it as:
“A form of detention under which individuals are detained by state authorities based on secret security grounds that the defendant and their lawyer cannot review, effectively circumventing due process guaranteed for all persons deprived of their liberty under international law.” 
Nearly 40 percent of Palestinian men, and 20 percent of the population, spend time in Israel’s prisons at some point in their lives. Few families are untouched by the system’s vast reach. Having served prison time is one of the legal bases for being denied working rights inside Israel, amounting to de facto discrimination for the “crime” of being Palestinian.
Welcome to Hell is a reminder that apartheid is not simply a government policy in Israel. It is embedded in the structure of the state. Judicial, military and prison apparatuses are structured to oppress and discriminate against the Palestinian people. Their apartheid function is established by more than just legislation. 
Even the most rudimentary legal “rights” for Palestinians are rendered meaningless by the racist structure of the state apparatus. Muhammad Srur’s description of his attempt, in a court hearing, to appeal his treatment at the hands of guards illustrates this:
“I also spoke about how we were brutally attacked and abused by the guards during transfers, but the judge didn’t pay attention to that. After the hearing, on the way to the cell, the IPS [Israel Prison Service] people took revenge on me for complaining about their behavior. They hit and kicked me brutally the whole way.”
Under far-right Minister of National Security Itamar Ben Gvir, apartheid is open policy. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s genocidal regime has given the state apparatus licence to commit any and every act of violence. The “prison state of emergency” has emboldened and strengthened the far-right government’s allies in the state machine. Negev Prison chief Brigadier General Yosef Knipes explained as much to the conservative Orthodox magazine Mishpacha: 
“We can categorically say that the new policy and the tone set from the top are good for us—the executive authority. When government-level officials back decisions and give the professionals in the field the powers needed to get the job done properly, it produces the desired outcomes.”
A change in government will not fundamentally alter these institutions, not least because every significant party is committed to apartheid. As the report concludes: “Minister Ben Gvir’s influence remains evident, but his policy could not have been implemented without the cooperation of the entire system”. 
Liberation for Palestine means the dismantling of the whole system of apartheid between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.

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