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The genocide implemented by the State of Israel against the proletarians in and around the Gaza Strip (leaving aside for the moment the „deeds” of Israeli settlers supported by their army in the West Bank) has not „only“ been responsible for 60 thousand or, according to some independent sources, 100 thousand deaths. How many future deaths are to come due to the consequences of crippling injuries, the impossibility of surviving after the loss of limbs, of being unable to access the necessary treatment for pre-existing health conditions or those that may have developed over whole months of unceasing slaughter or that will occur in the near future because of devastated hospital facilities? Or else, far more cruelly, due purely to hunger and malnutrition. There are many faces to genocide. The physical and material devastation from air, land and sea attacks on towns, villages and countryside is increasingly rendering more or less the whole of the region uninhabitable: how is survival possible amongst the tottering skeletons of the few houses still standing, along streets wiped out by bombing, amidst dry and unusable cisterns and water pipes, wrecked drainage and blown-up electricity networks, on a territory made uninhabitable by land-mines, radioactive munitions and poisoned soil and sub-soil?

Only a few months ago, when commenting the outcome of America’s presidential elections, we concluded that for some time now in the United States there has been “an often dramatic social situation affecting almost all sectors of the workforce across every region of this vast country. Struggles have multiplied over the years, sometimes conducted by official trade unions with a shameful history behind them and facing strong pressure from workers; and sometimes as an expression of grassroots organizations, which are something of a novelty in the complicated post-World War II era. It’s very simple: workers in the land that symbolizes imperialist domination are in dire straits and can’t take it any more”. And we recalled the series of struggles and unrest that had broken out in diverse sectors in the world of work, from the dockers to the Boeing workers, from workers in the food industry to the coal miners of Alabama, from the joiners, to the installers, to the maintenance staff of telephone companies, from the Amazon workforce to that of the service sector and the so-called gig economy and so on (see: “A Few Words about the US Elections“, the internationalist, no. 11/2025).

Under the pressure of the world crisis of the capitalist mode of production, the situation in the Middle East is getting more critical, day by day.  However it may develop in the near future, the war between Israel and Iran is, at one and the same time, a symptom and an accelerator, adding to its gravity.

The State of Israel, already committed to ethnic cleansing in and around Gaza, is performing to perfection the role it was assigned right after the Second World War by the victorious imperialist powers, first and foremost the USA and USSR closely followed by France and England: the role and function of armed gendarme, paid and supported by the interests of world capitalism, at the heart of a region bursting with crude oil, gas and other precious raw materials, as well as being a crossroads of international trade.  On their part, all the local bourgeoisies (Arab or not) have done, whether laymen or bigots, corrupt and reactionary, fearful of the more powerful imperialisms, has been to hang on as hard as they can to the deposits of black gold, following the scent of money, no matter whether dollars, rubles, euros or yen.

We are totally unsurprised by the recent events upsetting the world, bringing discussions over the „third world war“ into bars and TV talk shows. We are not interested here in attacking the more or less fascist bourgeois right wing: it is a declared enemy. The problem instead consists in the reformist false friends, pacifists and democrats: all of whom have deceived and continue to deceive our class, maintaining that it is still possible to improve capitalism, eliminating its contradictions. At times they even pretend they’re communists: but communism is the active and organised negation of bourgeois rule, both in its democratic and in its fascist guises. Being communist means opposing all imperialist wars, declaring open war on capital and first and foremost on our own bourgeoisie.