The world working class must defeat this fascist plan
Trump has laid his cards on the table by proposing a final solution to the “Palestinian problem”: carrying out a savage ethnic cleansing in Gaza that would crown the Zionist genocide. To many commentators this seems like yet another whim of an eccentric president, and they downplay the issue by alluding to its low “viability”. But the reality is concrete. That the highest representative of American imperialism is putting forward ideas like those that Hitler and the Nazi leadership defended and embodied in the 1930s shows that the threat looming over the working class and the oppressed peoples of the world is very serious.
We are facing a fact of historic significance. At a press conference in the White House alongside the murderer Netanyahu, Trump announced that the US would take control of the Gaza Strip, expelling its two million inhabitants, to turn it into a large luxury resort in the style of the French Riviera. To think that we are dealing with mere whims, or that they are the delirious plans of a real estate developer, is a gross error. Trump's speech and his supremacist proposals are not the result of improvisation, but have been discussed and agreed upon, among others, with his Zionist ally in Tel Aviv.
The enthusiasm expressed by senior Republicans such as the President of the US Congress, Mike Johnson, Netanyahu himself, and representatives of the Zionist far right, Bezalel Smotrich and Ben Gvir, for this roadmap is clear evidence of this. Following Trump's remarks, Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz, of the Likud, demanded that the army organize a plan to carry out the "voluntary transfer" of the Gazans.
If this new infamous chapter proves anything, it is that all the steps taken since the beginning of the Zionist genocide, now under Trump but before that under the Democrats, have been carried out with the consent and full approval of the White House. The US and Israel are hand in hand in this process. They have destroyed Gaza, they have designed a new geopolitical map for the Middle East on a mountain of Palestinian corpses, they have hit Hezbollah and Iran hard, their great enemy in the region, and now they intend to finish the job regardless of the consequences. As we said, the ceasefire agreed at the beginning of the year was tailor-made for Zionism and American imperialism and was another milestone in this strategy.
But the target of this message is not only Gaza. The policy of Trumpism since its return to the White House has an aggressive and fascist bias that is impossible to hide, and this is no coincidence. It directly threatens with imperialist interventions, terrorizes millions of immigrants by imposing the militarization of society, and thus prepares the ground for a furious attack on the left, the unions, and the native working class. The message is clear. Despite the decrepitude of American capitalism, they will fight tooth and nail for its supremacy, even if that means generating chaos, war and barbarism.
On the other hand, Trump's proposal also shows who these fascists serve, wanting to turn the Gaza Strip into a holiday paradise for millionaires, and seeking to obtain juicy profits from real estate speculation after expelling the Palestinians. Obviously, this is not the main reason for this step by American imperialism, but it shows how Trump and the far right perfectly represent the interests of the capitalist plutocracy. Just as it happened with Hitler, Mussolini or Franco.
We must remember the lessons of history. Fairy tales that tell us of a consolidated democracy that cannot be brought down are of no use in understanding either the phenomenon of fascism or its rise. The Nazi party was a marginal group in Germany in the first half of the 1920s. Its programme seemed like a compilation of the delusions of a resentful madman. But in the context of a capitalism in crisis, a parliamentary system incapable of containing the rise of class struggle and polarisation, and in a world shaken by inter-imperialist struggle and revolution, the “democratic” German bourgeoisie ended up supporting Hitler.
The Nazis used the Jewish people as their scapegoat, on whom they poured all their racist hatred to mobilize the angry masses of the petite bourgeoisie and declassed sections of the working class. They began by proposing the “voluntary” displacement of the Jews. That was their first “final solution.” They passed legislation to marginalize them from society, such as the famous Nuremberg Laws, which prevented them from working, throwing them into misery, and then, later on, locking them up in ghettos. The goal, as now for Trump and Netanyahu, was to force them to emigrate from the land where they were born and had lived for generations.
The difficulties they faced led the Nazis to propose other “imaginative” solutions, such as the possible expulsion of the Jews to Madagascar, an idea they took from the leaders of the French right, who were deeply anti-Semitic, and also to sign the Haavara agreements with a sector of Zionism to force their emigration to Palestine. Once the Second World War began, Hitler opted for gas chambers and crematoria. But the Holocaust was thus forged, before the eyes of everyone and with the consent of the capitalist powers of the “democratic” world.
At that time, as is happening now with the Palestinian people, a central factor was the passivity and complicity of the so-called liberal nations, Great Britain, France or the USA, and of the international community, which not only did not lift a finger against the public and notorious persecution of Jews, and also of Gypsies, trade unionists and communists, the disabled and homosexuals, but continued to reach agreements and do business with the Third Reich, despite knowing about the existence of ghettos and concentration camps. Their policy of “appeasement” towards Hitler is a copy of the same attitude that the EU maintains today with Netanyahu and Trump. And just as in the 1930s, all these “democratic” powers toughened their immigration laws, denying asylum to millions of refugees from Nazism.
Trump wants to finish what Biden started
If Trump can put these plans on the table, it is thanks to the level of destruction and barbarism that the Zionist State has imposed on Gaza. A true holocaust, with 70,000 people killed, 6% of the population – nearly 200,000 according to The Lancet if we include those who died from injuries, infections, hunger and cold – the result of the full support of American imperialism, and specifically, of the Biden Administration. That the Democrats are now throwing their hands up in horror is a joke in bad taste, as they paved the way for ethnic cleansing.
Israel and the US have razed the north of the Strip, where before October 7, 775,000 people lived in Gaza City alone. A strategy that aimed to turn a densely populated area into a wasteland, making it completely uninhabitable to guarantee a permanent military occupation and precipitate the expulsion of all those who survived the genocide. Now Trump is openly stating the issue: Gaza is a mass of rubble and ruins - as if by divine intervention - and it is better to completely "cleanse" the area. The criminal genocide of Netanyahu and Biden has created the conditions for Trump to now propose ethnic cleansing.
The plan is very clear. Continue to keep Gaza in complete destruction, boycott any attempt to rebuild it, allow Israel to continue to hinder the entry of humanitarian aid and, if necessary, resume the bombings and massacres. With this policy of siege and extermination, they intend to force the Gazan people to abandon their land.
It is pathetic that the German Social Democratic government and its Zionist foreign minister are now complaining about Trump's proposal for ethnic cleansing. The same people who have armed Netanyahu to the teeth, and who have encouraged and justified the genocide in Gaza day in and day out, are now surprised. What cynicism!
The EU, concerned only with avoiding a tariff war with Trump, has taken a backseat to this savage proposal. They do not want to upset Trump, nor his far-right allies in Europe. This is the “ethics” of NATO social democracy. Both the newspaper El País and the Foreign Minister of the PSOE-Sumar Government are outraged by Trump’s proposal, and claim that it is a blow against international law, against human rights, that the forced displacement of the population is not permitted, that it is a crime. So what? Was the extermination of tens of thousands of Gazans in these 15 months permitted? Or the use of hunger, thirst and cold as a weapon of war, beating babies and children, women and civilians? Or the attack on hospitals? Or the murder of journalists?
The list of Zionist misdeeds is endless, but the problem is that the Spanish government maintains all economic, diplomatic and military relations with the State of Israel. The problem is that Pedro Sánchez travelled quickly to Tel Aviv to shake hands with Netanyahu. The problem is that Pedro Sánchez has praised Biden and the Democrats as the great allies against the extreme right, while they supported the genocide in Gaza. Yes, it must be said, anti-fascist speeches and empty declarations of solidarity with the Palestinian people cannot hide the complicity of social democracy and liberals around the world with genocide, and now with ethnic cleansing.
Arab countries and supposed allies of the Palestinian cause
On the other hand, corrupt Arab regimes, from Egypt and Jordan to Qatar and Saudi Arabia, have been shocked by Trump's proposal. But Trump knows these despots well, who have always betrayed the Palestinian people for juicy rewards. It is true that for now they are ruling out this solution, but not for moral or principled reasons, but rather out of fear of a revolutionary uprising in the Arab world.
As they have demonstrated during this year and a half of genocide, the Arab capitalist regimes are not and will never be allies of the Palestinian people, just as they were not in the 1940s when the State of Israel was founded. They are well aware of the revolutionary potential of the Palestinian cause. After the Nakba, the ethnic cleansing unleashed by Zionism, the pro-British regimes of Egypt, Jordan, Iraq or Syria faced powerful social rebellions by the masses for their role as a mercenary in the Palestinian disaster. Most of them collapsed, opening the door to profound revolutionary processes based on pan-Arab nationalism and socialism. That memory, and that of the Arab springs from 2011 onwards, terrifies them. And hence their refusal, for now, to accept a new Nakba at the hands of Trump.
These corrupt regimes hate the Palestinian people. That is why they have not lifted a finger to stop the current genocide, or, like Egypt, have even drawn up plans to lock up Gazans in new concentration camps in the Sinai if Israel decided to expel them. The Arab League, which has demanded that Europe act against Israel, has refused to declare an oil and gas boycott against Tel Aviv, as it did in 1973. Let us not fool ourselves. Their capacity for economic and political pressure to end this situation was not secondary, but they have very consciously decided not to use it. The important thing for these satraps is to continue doing business. Now, by the way, with the reconstruction of the Gaza Strip.
We must draw conclusions from all these events. All those who have placed their hopes in the Arab capitalist governments, in the dictatorship of the mullahs of Iran, or in the foreign policy of China or Russia to fight the Zionists and liberate the Palestinian people have come up against a terrible reality. Neither Putin, nor Xi Jinping, nor the Iranian clerics are motivated by any socialist or emancipatory objective. They are fighting the US for control of markets, strategic raw materials, trade routes and global production chains. It is a struggle for supremacy. But none of these capitalist regimes, neither the Chinese, nor the Russian, nor the Iranian, mobilise the world working class, nor raise the revolutionary struggle against US imperialism. They are not the allies of the Palestinian people, nor is Islamic fundamentalism.
In the age of imperialism, capitalist powers are driven only by geostrategic and economic interests, and they do so by brute force. Trump and Netanyahu are taking this approach to its logical conclusion, but they are doing so because they are not facing opposition. Just like Hitler in the 1930s, when the appeasement policy of Great Britain and France, and even Roosevelt in the USA, allowed the Nazis to take steps towards war and barbarism.
The Palestinian cause is the cause of all the oppressed and the working class. For a revolutionary internationalist alternative!
The ceasefire is serving to focus Israel's attention on the West Bank, with brutal raids on Palestinian refugee camps and towns. They are preparing a new phase of their occupation of Palestinian territories and ethnic cleansing, and will have Trump's support to definitively legitimize the illegal settlements of far-right settlers. Another violation of international law against which the UN will cry out helplessly. But it doesn't matter. Now Trump has decreed sanctions against the International Criminal Court, making it clear that he will not stop at any diplomatic obstacle.
The reactionary drift of Israeli society, in which 82% of the population, according to the latest polls, justifies the ethnic cleansing of Gaza proposed by Trump, is the mirror in which the ultra-right and neo-fascists of the whole world, Milei, Meloni, Orban, Erdogan, etc., look. They are rubbing their hands at such a favourable consensus, which sows despair and demoralisation among broad layers.
To see how fascism can advance in a society, one only has to look at what is happening in Israel. The drift has not only depended on the most supremacist elements, but has been driven by a secular and Zionist opposition, which has gone from denouncing Netanyahu as a threat to democracy to now enthusiastically justifying Trump's proposal for ethnic cleansing. This supposedly democratic opposition, just like the Zionist Labour Party before it, is paving the way for Israel to become a fundamentalist theocratic dictatorship. A racial dictatorship from which sooner or later Arab-Israeli citizens would also be expelled, and where unions or the feminist and LGBT movement would be crushed.
Thinking that what happened in the 1930s cannot be repeated, that it is a thing of the past, does not prepare us for the next period. The same objective forces that led to the rise of fascism and Nazism at that time are at work now. The reaction, supported by more and more sections of the capitalists and financial elites, as evidenced by Trump's inauguration, is preparing itself. They are not yet betting on openly fascist dictatorships, for fear of a revolutionary response, but they are behaving with increasing audacity and aggression.
At the same time, liberals and social democrats, like the Israeli opposition, issue proclamations in defence of democracy, against the threat of the far right, against fascism, and then make deals with the right-wing reaction on all essential issues, placing immigrants as a target for their racist legislation and fomenting hatred. And in all developed nations they collaborate in taking punitive, authoritarian and Bonapartist measures that restrict democratic rights, and they lend a hand so that the financial bourgeoisie continues to enrich itself obscenely.
Trump's fascist proposal against the Palestinian people gives us a measure of the era we are entering. A turbulent period of class struggle, war, barbarism and counterrevolution, but also of socialist revolution.
We are facing a very serious threat, but it is clear that translating words into action will not be easy. The Palestinian people will not voluntarily abandon their land. They will resist despite the terrible martyrdom they endure, as they did in 1948, in 1967 and during the seventy-seven years of Zionist colonialism. The march of thousands of Palestinians from the south to the north of Gaza, in order to recover their land and what remains of their homes, is a good example of this. Despite the placement of American private contractors in the Netzarim strip, which the Israeli army built to separate the south and north of Gaza, and despite the attempt to prevent them from passing, the determination and dignity of the Palestinian people finally prevailed.
But it is necessary to draw conclusions from what has happened in order to confront the threat of supremacist Zionism and Trumpist fascism. Both the Hamas leadership, and the PLO in its day, have made the national liberation struggle in Palestine conditional on their alliances and agreements with Arab governments and elites, and have subordinated themselves to the politics of fundamentalism. Today, this strategy, especially after this terrible genocide, has shown its bankruptcy.
The struggle of the Palestinian and Lebanese people against Zionism and American imperialism is, without a doubt, an example of courage and a complete inspiration. No one can deny the right to armed resistance against the Zionist occupiers. But weapons are powerless if they are not accompanied by a revolutionary, communist and internationalist program, based on mass action. The question of military resources, always in conditions of inferiority in front of the brutal imperialist machine, can be compensated by a firm revolutionary strategy, which strongly calls on all Arab peoples to rise up against their corrupt governments in order to make solidarity with the Palestinian cause effective and real. This is what the Zionist, American and Arab bourgeoisie fears most, the emergence of a unified revolutionary movement on socialist and classist bases in the Middle East.
In the face of the fascist plans of Trump and the Zionists, we must raise the flag of revolutionary internationalism, calling for a great movement of global solidarity, with mass workers' actions, organizing stoppages and general strikes that demonstrate the power that we, the workers, have. Only in this way will we be able to confront and stop them. We need a movement like the one that arose in the 1930s in solidarity with the Spanish State, after Franco's fascist coup, and which became an inspiration for anti-fascists, socialists and communists around the world. Not only must we defeat this genocide and ethnic cleansing against the Palestinian people, we must finish off Trump, Milei, Meloni, Abascal, Erdogan, Al Sisi...
However much they may have devastated Gaza, it is impossible for them to avoid new revolutionary crises in Palestine and the Middle East. Preparing for them, drawing the right lessons, is the task before us. There are no intermediate solutions. Either the domination of Zionism and colonialism, or the socialist revolution by putting an end to the State of Israel - that is, by expropriating its bourgeoisie - and by proposing the overthrow of the Arab capitalist governments and the Palestinian bourgeoisie, linked by thousands of businesses to Zionism and Western imperialism.
This is the key to ending the national and class oppression of the Palestinian people and building a Socialist Federation of the Middle East where all peoples can live in peace, equality and free from imperialist barbarism.
