Palestine and Marxism
By Joseph Daher
Resistance Books
150 pp
Available from resistancebooks.org
As Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza grinds on, threatening to engulf part of Lebanon and provoking Iran, anti-war activists will find Joseph Daher’s Palestine and Marxism an informative class-based background.
Daher’s book situates Palestine in the context of more than a century of imperialist intervention in the Middle East. It provides a useful context for a better understanding about this seemingly intractable war.
Daher starts with the current Gaza war — the “new Nakba” — by delving into the birth of Zionism, the dispossession of Palestinians from their land (the first Nakba) and then moves to imperialism’s defence of Israel, including through the Oslo Accords, Arab nationalism and the formation and development of Hamas and Hezbollah.
He answers the question about why the Arab states, which purport to support Palestine, have sat on their hands over more than a year of recent carnage.
It also backgrounds how imperialism has ensured Israel survives and expands since 1948 and why, despite their anti-imperialist rhetoric, Islamic forces will always side with capitalism over forces presenting revolutionary solutions.
Daher also discusses how imperial and regional powers have used nationalist and fundamentalist forces to derail and defeat revolutionary processes.
Ethnic and religious sectarianism, a product of the combined and uneven development of countries in the Middle East, has also worked against popular uprisings from being able to develop.
The liberation and development of Arab countries, Daher writes, needs to be based on “progressive social transformation of the socioeconomic structures of oppression and domination”, not some sort of Islamic identity or culture.
But, Western attempts to portray Hamas and Hezbollah as “terrorists”, similar to jihadists, are not new and not correct, he argues.
While it would be a mistake, Dahler says, to see fundamentalism as “some deflected expression of anti-imperialism”, resistance to the colonial and racist state of Israel has to be supported.
Right now, that resistance is being led by Hamas and Hezbollah. But he cautions that this is different to support for their overall political projects.
Palestine and Marxism is quite dense, especially given it covers the complexities arising from the colonial carve-up of the Middle East, after World War II.
As Daher himself admits, each chapter “could be developed into a book in its own right”.
Daher is the author of After the Uprisings (Pluto, 2019) and Hezbollah: The Political Economy of Lebanon’s Party of God (Pluto, 2016) and he is the founder of the blog Syria Freedom Forever.
His conclusions are that imperialist-brokered peace deals are doomed and that Palestinian workers’ struggle “remains central” to finding a just solution, pointing to the 2021 general strikes Palestinians undertook across Israel and the Occupied Territories during Israel’s attacks on Gaza that year.
He writes that even while Hamas is now a “leading” political actor, further marginalising the weakened Palestinian Authority, the need for an overall political solution is even more urgent.
Based on its record, he argues Hamas will not bring the region’s working classes and oppressed peoples into a liberatory project. Rather, it will look for alliances with the region’s ruling classes and regimes to support its battles against Israel.
However, what deal Israel is putting to the Arab regimes about the carve-up of Gaza remains to be seen, especially in light of Donald Trump’s victory in the United States.
Daher believes a permanent and just solution for Palestine would have to involve all countries in the Middle East and, perhaps, North Africa. Right now, that looks to be fantastical. However, the global upsurge for Palestine, since October last year was not predicted either.
Building solidarity with Palestine, to be able to finally win its liberation from the apartheid state of Israel, is vital work for leftists and progressives.
Daher’s book, which includes several useful historical summaries and writings in its annex (The birth of Islam; The Oslo Accords and their aftermath; From the River to the sea — a democratic and inclusive slogan; and Ernest Mandel’s 1947 Draft Thesis on the Jewish Question, prepared for the International Secretariat of the Fourth International) provides a useful background.