Criticism of the Left: Middle East Conflict: The World of Death of Capitalism

The overwhelming majority of the left worldwide squeezes the Middle East conflict into an anti-colonial schema of enchanting simplicity. For them, the history of Israel is nothing more than imperial enslavement of the ancestral population; the birth of the Jewish state from anti-Semitic persecution and mass destruction appears in this picture as little as the fair share that the Arab reaction in all its variants – from strictly authoritarian state socialism up to jihadism – had and still has the messy situation.

That the mass (and unjustifiable) expulsion of Palestinians in 1948 took place in the course of a war that began with an attack on Israel by its Arab neighboring states; that these people have hardly been integrated anywhere due to a perfidious calculation and that their children and grandchildren have to endure in refugee camps to this day; that the vehemently asserted right to “return” is extended to these children and children’s children according to ethnic logic – all of this makes the picture too complicated for the anti-colonial mind and is therefore ignored.

Imagined collective subjects

In this perspective, “Palestine”, a collective subject that knows neither classes nor political factions, acts consistently with the pure legitimacy of the colonially oppressed. In the worst case scenario, even a bloodbath like the one Hamas caused on October 7th becomes a justified act of resistance and liberation. There is no need to say many words about the bankruptcy of such leftists, from spiritually derelict intellectuals to squatters in Berlin-Friedrichshain.

A slightly less drastic variant is to not necessarily condone the mass murder committed by Hamas, but not to mention it with a single syllable. He hardly appears in the current calls for pro-Palestinian demonstrations, as if the Israeli military were shelling the Gaza Strip just for fun and tricks. Actually, people who don’t want to come to terms with the miserable situation of the Palestinian population should actually wish the plague on Hamas. It is exercising a reign of terror and has coldly taken the massive Israeli military strikes into account in its massacre.

This simple statement serves other factions of the left to give Israel’s ruthless actions in the Gaza Strip the higher sanctification of anti-fascist necessity. There should be no further mention of the crazy Bahamas troops, which are calling for collective punishment of the population in Gaza because the Allied area bombings of German cities in the Second World War were, after all, great. She is the reflection of the inhumanity of the Hamas claqueurs and has long felt right at home on the other side of the barricade.

But far beyond that, what began in the late 1980s as an overdue self-criticism of a rabidly “anti-Zionist” left has long since degenerated into an ideology. The criticism of “anti-Semitism from the left” became an apology for the state of Israel. When the Jungle World comes up with the headline “Israel or Barbarism” shortly after the Hamas massacre, it is unconsciously telling the bleak truth about a milieu for which the defense of the Jewish state and, beyond that, the Western democratic world by all means necessary takes the place of socialism.

Skewed worldviews

And again, mirroring the idiocy of the anti-colonial friend-enemy scheme, enormous efforts at repression are necessary in order to maintain the skewed worldview. The fact that the extremist settlers in the West Bank murdered 51 people in the week after the Hamas massacre alone, as usual with the tacit approval of the Israeli “security forces,” is not worth mentioning. Such a thing is normally called a pogrom, and a pogrom is a poor alternative to barbarism. The massive shift to the right within Israeli politics and the well-advanced authoritarian restructuring of the state, which has briefly and secretly forced even hardened anti-Germans to make a few critical noises towards the Netanyahu government, will be forgotten in the war frenzy, as will all the other events of the last few years that have caused this could counteract your own narrative.

Government personnel enthusiastically raving about a “Gaza-Nakba” and IDF spokesmen who openly admit that the counteroffensive is not designed for accuracy but for maximum destruction, do not feature in the narrative of Israel fans, nor do the events that that preceded the current escalation: the attacks by settler mobs on Huwara, the killing of 181 Palestinians in the West Bank (the highest number in 18 years), Netanyahu’s presentation of his plan for a new Middle East (without Palestine) to the UN, the provocations on Temple Mount etc. From the correct and rather banal observation that Hamas’ terror is not simply a (possibly still legitimate) reaction to Israel’s politics, these leftists have drawn the grotesque conclusion of completely abstracting from the actual politics of the Israeli right-wing government .

For the anti-national class struggle

And so on and so forth: There is currently more than usual illustrative material for the ideological criticism of a left that has apparently conspired to sabotage the world revolution through the division of labor. We maintain, however, that only anti-national class struggle offers a way out of the catastrophe. That’s as true as it remains helpless for now. The murders of Israeli civilians will no more promote class fraternity across national borders than the mass horror in the Gaza Strip that the Israeli military is currently causing. In this respect, what applies to every social revolutionary movement applies to our statement. We are on the sidelines of history, but we must not let our own powerlessness make us stupid.

This text was written as a foreword to a statement critical of nationalism by the Internationalist Perspective group on the Middle East conflict. Both can be found at:

communaut.org/de/die-todeswelt-des-kapitalismus