From the River to the Sea Palestine Will Be Free- A Statement from Cincinnati Socialists
Demonstrators supporting the Palestinians in front of Egypt's Permanent Mission to the UN in New York on October 9, 2023. ADAM GRAY / AFP
“... When you talk about revolution, most people think violence, without realizing that the real content [of] any kind [of] revolutionary thrust lies… …in the principles and the goals you’re striving for… …On the other hand, because of the way society’s organized, because of the violence that exists on the surface everywhere, you have to expect that there are going to be such explosions… …And that’s why, when someone asks about violence… I just find it incredible. Because it means that person asking that question has absolutely no idea what Black people have gone through, what Black people have experienced in this country since the time the first Black person was kidnapped from the shores of Africa.”
In the wake of Hamas' attack in the area surrounding Gaza, there is an outcry of "Terrorism!" among not only mainstream media, but liberal public opinion, the latter of which is quick to simplify and moralize a narrative which, much as Davis points out above, erases the historical struggles of the Palestinian people. Cincinnati Socialists stand in solidarity with the oppressed who fight their oppressor for liberation, including the Palestinian people, who have been the target of Israel's unfettered violence, and the subject of an asymmetric conflict funded and perpetuated by the US.
Since 1917, Palestine has been unlawfully and brutally occupied by Zionist settlers. In 1948, Israel forcefully expelled 750,000 Palestinians from their homes and have since continued the rapid expansion of its ethnostate. Gaza is an open-air prison, and any attempt to distort that requires a rewriting of history. It is wholly too convenient, and beneficial to the ruling classes of all nations, to simplify and erase the history of Israel's perpetual oppression of Palestinians. It is to the benefit of imperialism to expect the oppressed to take the moral high ground. Considering the long and sordid history of ethnic cleansing at the hands of the Zionist settler colony, we cannot help but ask why politicians, academics, and the intelligentsia don't sound these same moral alarms against the IDF's continual expansion and settling into Palestinian territory.
This isn't a unique situation—for its entire history, the United States and other settler colonies have built themselves on such a dichotomy. Anti-apartheid struggles are called terrorist just as slave revolts were condemned. The capitalist project within the US posits itself as the international broker of treaty and truce, but has also created the conditions for uprisings while actively condemning those who fight for liberation.
Furthermore, while Cincinnati Socialists condemns all indiscriminate violence against civilians, we also insist that the Zionist project enlists all of its citizens as agents of the colonialist state, blurring the clear distinction between combatant and civilian. Therefore, we applaud and support those Israeli citizens who have refused to serve in the so-called defense forces of Israel, and we see this as a small but principled first step toward refusing Zionism entirely. We also support the millions of heroic Jews worldwide who have rejected Zionism from the start, and we condemn the cynical Zionist argument that these men and women are “self-hating Jews.” Indeed, we see this rhetoric as itself anti-semitic and, in most cases, barely disguised McCarthyism, since it implicitly casts any anti-imperialist Jew as an enemy of both the Jewish people and the American people.
Finally, we call on all socialist, communist, and Marxist organizations to announce publicly their unequivocal support for Palestine and opposition to Zionism. We declare moreover that the most implacable and vicious enemy of the American people is neither Hamas, nor Muslims generally, nor Palestine, but the US bourgeois state and the capitalist ruling class whose interests the state defends. We demand no war among peoples and no peace among classes. We say with the great martyred German communist Karl Liebknecht that the main enemy is at home, and that the enemy is not immigrants, drag queens, or striking workers, but the oligarchs of Wall Street, the Pentagon, and the Capitol. We say that the workers of the world should unite against colonialism, racism, imperialism, war, and capital. From Palestine to the West End, we have nothing but our chains to lose, and a world to win.