from Richard Mellor, Afscme Local 444, retired
From ‘Facts for Working People’
Ilan Pappe talks of what the future holds for Israel as the US colonial proxy disintegrates under intense pressure from the Palestinian resistance and the worldwide condemnation of its genocidal war. The Zionist Apartheid regime has already lost the war as it is in the process of bombing four countries at the moment with 80% of its weaponry coming from the US taxpayer. US offense industry profits are good. The Zionist regime is wreaking such havoc that it’s draining US supplies of weapons of mass destruction.
He talks of what the future holds for Israel as the US colonial proxy disintegrates under intense pressure from the Palestinian resistance and the worldwide condemnation of its genocidal war. The Zionist Apartheid regime has already lost the war as it is in the process of bombing four countries at the moment with 80% of its weaponry coming from the US taxpayer. US offense industry profits are good.
The Zionist regime is wreaking such havoc that it’s draining US supplies of weapons of mass destruction, “The Pentagon worries it could run out of its inventory faster than it can replace them…”the Wall Street Journal writes. In addition, since the beginning of Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza the US has spent $1.8 billion launching interceptor missiles against attacks from Iran and also to stop what the US media refers to as attacks by Yemeni Houthis on shipping entering the Red Sea. It should be noted that the Yemeni regime has made it clear that the attacks will stop if the mass murder in Gaza stops.
This expenditure of weapons is not good the Journal adds as it leaves the US, “….vulnerable in a potential conflict in the Pacific.” We can grasp how war is a natural by-product of the capitalist mode of production, it is integral to it.
Pappe refers to other examples of failed states and that it can be a long and violent process giving examples like Libya, Syria, and Iraq. It is worth noting that in all these examples, western Imperial power and its military arm, NATO is at the center of this disintegration.
Pappe raises the idea of a one state solution, a democratic secular state. This is a valid option, even as Jews would be in a minority but in a state with democratic rights for all. In other words, with decolonization the Palestinian Arab population can be looked to as offering the solution. But, Pappe says, with the independence of former colonial countries, what he calls decolonization, the result has often been a worse or as bad regime than the colonial power. It’s not what people were fighting for.
From my point of view this is inevitable because these nation states, a product of capitalism and for the colonized states, imposed from without, capitalism cannot reverse itself. If we look at the states in Africa for example, they did not develop organically in the way that England or France did, from within. If we take Nigeria, the British put a box around a huge area within which lived many different tribes and people and called in Nigeria. Why would there not be problems with this? This is why tribal culture and identity, was so important in the early days; a national identity can’t be manufactured in a parliamentary office in London.
When Pappe talks of a one state alternative, a democratic state, he is referring to a capitalist or bourgeois democracy. But we see even in the advanced capitalist countries a serious crisis and the potential for these states to break up. Here in the US we are witnessing as so called elections are taking place, a serious divide and rise of dangerous right wing and semi semi-fascist ideas as the nation state begins to crack.
Capitalism cannot advance humanity, only destroy it. It cannot rescue itself from the abyss. The only solution, not only to regional crisis as we are witnessing in the Middle East, North Africa, Kashmir and other former colonial dominions, even Northern Ireland, is a mass movement and intervention of the working class. Not just regionally, but an international working class movement and a resulting global federation of democratic socialist states, workers democracies where the production of human needs is a collective process in which the means of producing those needs, deciding what is to be produced and how we distribute them is taken out of the hands of a tiny minority that set production in motion on the basis of profits and who’s control over society is threatening us with extinction.
Read more HERE