Theses by Yossi Schwartz and Michael Pröbsting, Revolutionary Communist International Tendency (RCIT), 16 July 2024, www.thecommunists.net
1. The strategy of permanent revolution in the Middle East must be based on a correct understanding of the character of the class forces involved. Since World War II, the Middle East has been dominated by Western imperialism, in particular U.S. imperialism. (The only exceptions were a few countries which were temporarily aligned with the Stalinist USSR.) However, in the last decade, new imperialist powers entered the region and expanded their influence (China is a crucial trade partner of nearly all countries as well as a close political ally of Iran, it facilitated the rapprochement between Iran and Saudi Arabia; Russia coordinates its oil policy with OPEC, intervenes militarily in Syria and Libya, etc.).
2. The Middle East consists of capitalist semi-colonies (with the exception of Israel) and is dominated by imperialist Great Powers. This means that these countries are formally independent but essentially remain dependent on the capitalist world market and the Great Powers. However, some of these countries can be characterised as semi-colonial intermediate powers which try to play a role in the region (e.g. Türkiye in the Kurdish areas in Syria and Iraq; Iran in Iraq and Syria; Saudi Arabia and UAE in Yemen).
3. Between the two World Wars (1918-45), imperialist hegemony in the Middle East was primarily based on the colonial domination of the region mostly by Britain and France. However, with the decline of these two old imperialist powers after WWII and the absolute hegemony of U.S. imperialism within the capitalist camp, the political system of the region underwent important changes. Most states became formally independent but remained capitalist semi-colonies dependent on Western imperialism.
Israel’s class character and its role in the imperialist domination of the Middle East
4. A crucial factor guaranteeing such imperialist domination of the Middle East has been the systematic settlement of European Jews (who experienced antisemitic persecution in Europe) in Palestine at the end of the 19th century. Zionist colonial settlements were encouraged by the British Empire which started soon after the so-called Balfour Declaration in 1917. Such Zionist settlement resulted in the increasing oppression and expulsion of the native population – the Palestinian people – culminating in the Nakba in 1947/48 and the creation of the capitalist settler state Israel.
5. Of course, the relationship between Israel and its imperialist masters was not without frictions. Gaining strength, the Jewish settlers became impatient at some point after WWII and after they had helped the British Mandate authorities to brutally suppress the 1936-39 Arab Revolt. They pressurised Britain to give them Palestine rather than the native Palestinians who were the majority in the country. This resulted in a number of terror acts of the Zionists not only against the Arab population but also against the British colonial administration. Nevertheless, soon after 1948 Israel became a close ally of Britain and France and later of the U.S.
6. Since its inception, Israel has represented the most important bridgehead of Western imperialism in the Middle East. It waged numerous wars against Arab countries which were crucial to keep the region under imperialist domination. (1948, 1956, 1967, 1973, 1982, 2006, the bloody repression against the two Intifadas which began in 1987 resp. 2000, the Gaza Wars in 2008/09, 2012, 2014, 2021 and the current one since 7 October 2023; add to this a number of smaller military conflicts). Israel’s indispensable role as the guardian of Western imperialism in the region is reflected in the fact that it has been the largest recipient of U.S. aid in the past decades. Tellingly, Egypt became the second-largest recipient of U.S. aid after it signed the Camp David Accords on 17 September 1978, that led in the following year to a peace treaty between those two countries, the first such treaty between Israel and any of its Arab neighbours. Since then, Cairo has been a de facto ally of the Zionist state.
7. From the beginning of its existence, Israel has been a capitalist Apartheid and settler state. It has been characterised by peculiar features. Of course, it has not been the only settler state in history (e.g. the U.S., Australia, the white settlers in Algeria, South Africa, Namibia, and other African countries). However, it has been the only one which was created not in the early periods of capitalism or the 19th century but rather in the midst of the 20th century, i.e. in the epoch of imperialism – the final epoch of capitalism. Israel’s existence is based on the expulsion of most of the native Palestinian population among which most still have a living memory of the Nakba (either personally or via their parents and grandparents). Furthermore, it can only continue to exist if it upholds the oppression and expulsion of the Palestinian people. The implementation of the fundamental democratic right of the 14 million Palestinians to return to their homeland would automatically negate Israel’s existence as an ethnically Jewish state.
8. Several factors have allowed Israel an extraordinary strong political, economical and military position in the Middle East: a) the Nakba and the brutal oppression of the remaining Palestinian population, b) huge financial and military aid by imperialist powers, c) the character of many European Jews who settled in Palestine as skilled labour force, and d) the super-exploitation of the Palestinians, the Arab Jews (until 1967) and later of the migrants.
9. To these strength as a capitalist state several factors were added from the 1990s onwards: a) the collapse of Stalinism in 1991 and the rise of the U.S. (the long-time master of Israel), b) the technological revolution in the capitalist world economy which started in the 1980s, c) the immigration of about 1,6 million Jews from the former USSR (40% of them were highly educated professionals) and d) the influx of many migrants from semi-colonial countries (mostly Asia and Africa). These developments enabled Israel to develop a modern high-tech and arms industry and to create multinational corporations which joined the world market and undertook sizeable foreign investments. This resulted – in combination with its already dominating political and economic position in the Middle East – in Israel’s transformation into a junior imperialist state. Such a transformation is not unique as the examples of Australia and Canada – former dominions of the British colonial empire – demonstrate.
10. All these features give the Israeli settler society a distinct and highly privileged character which has got and can preserve its privileges only via maintaining the oppression resp. expulsion of the Palestinian population and its dominating position in the region. Leon Trotsky once characterized the white settlers in South Africa as a “privileged, arrogant caste of whites”. (Letter to South African Revolutionaries, 1933) This is also a quiet accurate characterisation for the Israeli settler society. Of course, when we speak about the Israeli Jews as a caste-like group, we don’t mean that they are a caste in a literary sense with strict formal social laws (like the castes in India). It is rather an analogy in order to illustrate their ethnic segregation, domination and Herrenmenschen mentality. Such a caste-like character does not negate the class divisions within the settler society (bourgeoisie, middle class, proletariat, etc.). But as long as the settler society is not fundamentally shaken as a whole (most likely by revolutionary upheavals of the oppressed masses in the region or by strategic defeats in wars), this caste-like character dominates over the internal class contradictions when it comes to the settler society’s relations to the oppressed people.
Peculiar feature of the Israeli-Jewish working class
11. It is a fundamental law of materialist dialectics that “the individual exists only in the connection that leads to the universal. The universal exists only in the individual and through the individual.” (Lenin) Hence, the nature of a specific class can only be understood in relation to the whole class society in which it exists. The above-mentioned specific features of Israeli capitalism have given the Israeli working class a peculiar character from the very beginning. As the richest and most powerful state in the region, because of the expulsion of the native population resp. oppression of the remaining minority of Palestinians and because it is part of a privileged caste-like group, the Israeli working class always had an aristocratic character. This was not the case for the Arab Jews (the Sephardi Jews born in Arab countries) in the first period but since the war in 1967, this sector has been also integrated and become part of the aristocratic Israeli working class.
12. The basis of such aristocratic character of the Israeli working class is the specific combination of the social and national gap between Jewish and Palestinian resp. migrant workers. This combination has resulted in an Apartheid system which is characterised by de facto ethnical segregation. By and large, the Palestinian workers – and more recently also the migrant workers from Asia and Africa – constitute the lower strata of the working class which are mostly cheap and precarious employed labour force. The large majority of them is concentrated in specific economic sectors and their wages are much lower than that of Jewish workers. In contrast, Jewish workers have much better, more secure jobs with higher wages.
13. Workers in well-paid and strategically important sectors – like information and communications technology, arms and diamond industry – are nearly all Jewish. While Palestinian citizens of Israel make up more than 1/5 of the population, only 2% of Arab men and 1% of Arab women work in the tech industry, according to government data.
14. The gap between Jewish and Palestinian workers is even more evident if one leaves out the specific group of Haredi Jews. (These are ultra-orthodox Jews who live under poor conditions and where many men don’t work in order to study the Torah). By 2019, average monthly salary for male as well as for female workers in the age of 25‒64 years was about 70% higher for non-Haredi Jews than for Arab citizens of Israel (with an even larger gap compared to Palestinians from the West Bank who are employed in Israel). As an Israeli economist noted, the result is a segregated economy where “many low-skilled disadvantaged workers (many of them women, Israeli Arabs, disabled individuals, immigrants and foreign-workers) are employed in poor jobs in the secondary labor market (mainly in the industries of construction, cleaning, security, agriculture and private services).” As a result, there are huge gaps between the different sectors of the Israeli society. According to government statistics, the official poverty rate is around 50% for Palestinians and close to 60% for Haredim but only 9% for non-Haredi Jews. Netanyahu, by the way, unintentionally confirmed Israel’s character as an Apartheid state when he said a few years ago that the Zionist state is doing “not badly” compared to other countries, and “if you deduct the Arabs and ultra-Orthodox from inequality indexes, we’re in great shape.”
15. The Palestinian workers are divided by the Green Line, i.e. those who are living in Israel as citizens and those who are living in the West Bank and Gaza but who regularly work in Israel (with the latter being even worse off). By 1931, 57.1% of all Palestinians were employed in agriculture (but only 18.1% of all Jews). As a result of the expanding Zionist land expropriation as well as industrialisation, by 1981 only 11.2% of all Arab citizens in Israel were employed in this sector and this share has even more declined since then. Today most Palestinians working in Israel (with origins on both sides of the Green Line) are employed in construction, manufacturing and agriculture while many have no job or work informally without a job permit.
16. In the 1970s and 1980s Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza made up around 7% of the Israeli labour force. Around 1/3 of the West Bank labour force and about half that of Gaza worked in Israel in this period, with around half this number working in the construction industry. However, since the first Intifada in 1987-93, many Palestinian workers have been replaced by migrant workers so since 2007 only 14-17% of Palestinians in the West Bank have a job in Israel and hardly anyone of those in Gaza (because of the blockade which the Zionists have imposed). However, the share of employment of Palestinians from the West Bank is somehow higher (20% in 2019) if one adds employment in Jewish settlements in that region. Almost half (45.6%) of Palestinians employed in Israel and the settlements were in informal employment in 2022. In agriculture, this share is even 66.3%!
17. Since the first Intifada in 1987-93, Israel strived to replace Palestinian workers from the West Bank and Gaza with migrants from Asia and Africa. As a result, hundreds of thousands of foreign workers have entered Israel. While Palestinians made up nearly all foreign workers before, about 4/5 of them were replaced by migrants who make up today about 10% of the labour force in Israel.
18. The ethnic segregation between Jewish and Palestinian resp. migrant workers becomes also evident even where they are employed within the same sector. One of the largest sectors, where Palestinian workers are employed is construction. Wages in construction are about ¼ to 1/3 lower than in the business sector. Palestinians make up about 1/5 of the Israeli population but around 40% of the workforce in construction (as opposed to 12.5% of Jewish Israelis). All in all, out of 292,100 official construction workers in Israel in 2019, 184,900 (i.e. more than 63%) were not Jewish, of which 156,200 were Palestinians from both sides of the Green Line. (Add to this that several tens of thousands of Palestinians who work without permits in the Israeli construction sector.) As a former official of Histadrut (the official state-linked trade union in Israel) noted, these non-Jewish employees “are working in the dirty works in construction and the others are managers and engineers.” Another form of discrimination is that Palestinian workers must pay contributions to Israel’s social security system but are not eligible for the benefits. The same was the case with contributions for the state “trade union” Histadrut until 2019.
19. The ethnic segregation of the labour market is also the reason why there is such a huge gap in strike activities. In sectors of the Israeli economy which are dominated by Palestinian and migrant workers – like construction and agriculture – hardly any strikes took place in the past quarter of a century. In contrast, there have been a number of economic strikes in the public sectors which is strongly dominated by Israeli-Jewish workers.
Consequences for the strategy of permanent revolution
20. For all these reasons the RCIT characterizes the Israeli-Jewish working class as extraordinary privileged in relation to the native Palestinian and the migrant labour force. Being part of the ruling, caste-like ethnic settler group, it represents a labour aristocratic layer (without ignoring the different sectors in between like men-women; Ashkenazim, Sephardi and Russian Jews, etc.). It is clear that a large part of the surplus value of Israeli capitalism is created by the Palestinian and the migrant workers.
21. This aristocratic character of the Israeli-Jewish workers in their totality is the material basis why the Zionist state has been able to ensure the loyalty of its working class throughout its history and despite the numerous wars. Because of such a materialist basis it is illusionary to imagine that it would be possible via economic demands or with appeals to class unity to win over a sizeable sector of the Israeli working class for joint struggle with the Palestinian and Arab masses for national and social liberation. Unfortunately, this is the rotten perspective of reformist Stalinism (e.g. Hadash) or the centrist tradition of Ted Grant (upheld by the CWI, the IMT and the ISA – “Socialist Struggle” in Israel).
22. In contrast, the RCIT and its comrades in Israel / Occupied Palestine in the Internationalist Socialist League have always rejected such a strategy which can only result in political failure and opportunist adaption to Zionism (see the support for the Zionist two-state solution by the Stalinists and Grantites). We reiterate that the struggle for Palestinian liberation can only win as part of the strategy of permanent revolution in the Middle East. The natural allies of the Palestinian masses are the Arab workers and fellahin (poor peasant) and, more generally, the international proletariat. The road to Jerusalem first goes via Cairo, Amman, Damascus and Beirut – not via Tel Aviv.
23. Only a victory of the Arab revolution resulting in the overthrow of the pro-imperialist dictators and the creation of workers and fellahin republics or a strategic defeat of the Zionist state in wars with other countries in the Middle East will be able to thoroughly shatter the Israeli class society. Only in such a scenario will it be possible to break a sector of the Israeli-Jewish working class away from Zionism (or at least to push them to take a neutral position).
24. The strategic goal of socialists is the struggle for a democratic and secular Palestinian state from the river to the sea. Such a state would allow all Palestinian refugees to return to their homeland and would automatically make it the majority population which it always had been before the Nakba and the creation of the Zionist state. It should be a workers and fellahin republic as part of a socialist federation of the whole region. Only a state which expropriates the monopolies and billionaires can ensure that the Palestinians get back their land and their homes. Only a socialist economy could elaborate a plan to rebuild Gaza and the West Bank and to share the wealth equally among all citizens.
25. Such a state would treat all citizens as equal irrespective of their religious or ethnic background. While the Jews would be a minority in such a state, they would have full religious and cultural rights. It is likely that some of the Zionist settlers could not accept the loss of their dominant position, as it was the case with many white settlers in Africa. But all those who accept to live as equals with the Palestinians will be welcomed.
26. The theory and the strategy of the permanent revolution confirm the dialectical law of the negation of the negation. The solution to the rights of the native Palestinians and the settler-colonialist Jews that constituted 1/3 of the population in Palestine before 1948, should have been a Palestinian state with civil rights to the Jewish minority in terms of culture and religion. However, the Zionists negated this solution and took over 78% of Palestine and expelled between 700,000 and 900,000 Palestinians. In 1967, the Zionists negated the outcome of the war of 1947-48 and unified the land of Palestine under the rule of the Zionists and expelled more Palestinians. A possible defeat of the current Zionist war on Gaza would open the road to the solution that was needed in 1947 – a Palestinian state with a Jewish minority from the river to the sea. This would be the negation of the Zionist rule of Palestine on a higher level as many millions of Palestinian refugees will return (not simply 900,000 but close to 14 million), there will be a revolutionary distribution of the land, and the workers-led economy will provide for employment, housing, and social services for all.
* * * * * *
The figures in this document are taken from:
Michael Debowy, Gil S. Epstein, and Avi Weiss: The Labor Market in Israel: An Overview, in: State of the Nation Report: Society, Economy and Policy 2022, Taub Center, December 2022, pp. 291-321
Sai Englert: Hebrew Labor without Hebrew Workers: The Histadrut, Palestinian Workers, and the Israeli Construction Industry, Journal of Palestine Studies, 52:3 (2023), pp. 23-45, DOI: 10.1080/0377919X.2023.2244188
International Labour Office: The situation of workers of the occupied Arab territories, Geneva 2023
Matan Kaminer: At the zero degree / Below the minimum: Wage as sign in Israel’s split labor market, in: Dialectical Anthropology (2019) 43:317–332, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10624-019-09560-7
Samir M. Miari: The Arabs in Israel: A National Minority and Cheap Labor Force, a Split Labor Market Analysis, Dissertations 2455, 1986
Shoshana Neuman: Labor Market Segmentation: The Israeli Case, Department of Economics, Bar-Ilan University, Israel; CEPR, London; IZA, Bonn, 2012
Shoshana Neuman: Job Quality in Segmented Labor Markets: The Israeli Case, Bar-Ilan University, Israel, Discussion Paper No. 8750, December 2014
UNCTAD: The Economic Costs of the Israeli Occupation for the Palestinian People: Arrested Development and Poverty in the West Bank, Geneva 2021
United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia: Palestine Under Occupation III. Mapping Israel’s Policies and Practices and their Economic Repercussions in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, Beirut 2022