A review of Palestine and Marxism

brian bean reviews Joseph Daher’s new book Palestine and Marxism, which argues, “The main task for the left remains developing a strategy based on regional solidarity from below.”

As the world trembles in the face of the ongoing genocide in Gaza, its expansion into Lebanon, and the ominous tremors of escalation of an ongoing regional war, Joseph Daher’s new book, Palestine and Marxism, is an essential read for the new layer of organizers and radicals who have filled the world’s streets, established university encampments, and engaged in civil disobedience to confront Israeli state terrorism and its staunch support by the United States.

Daher, a Syrian Swiss socialist, clearly and passionately argues that the way forward for liberation is through regional revolt and revolutions. “Regional revolutionary transformation,” he asserts, is “the only realistic strategy for liberation.”

“The main task for the left remains developing a strategy based on regional solidarity from below”, he writes.

“That means opposing the Western states and Israel on the one side while also opposing regional authoritarian states—Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Qatar, UAE, etc.—struggle from below, is the only way to win liberation for the popular classes of the Middle East from regimes held up by the imperial power of the United States, Russia, and China.”

Palestine and Marxism is a timely and incisive book that illuminates the current moment and should provoke deeper strategic thinking. The book offers an impressively concise overview of several key political questions, from the material roots of Zionism, to the strategic importance of Palestine for imperialism, to the political trends of Arab nationalism and Islamism.

While at times the book seems hastily edited by its publisher, and thus has some redundancy, jumps around at times, and lacks some necessary citations, the political arguments here deserve deep engagement.

The Marxist approach to Palestinian liberation is bound up with the way political Zionism—the ideological basis for the exclusionary Israeli ethnostate—is intrinsically connected with forces of capital and imperialism. While motivated by the suffering of Jewish communities in Eastern Europe and the resurgence of antisemitism in the west, Daher argues that political Zionism was “a part of a colonial logic consistent with the European context” of the turn of the 20th century. “Religion only provided some justifications and narratives for a modern nationalist ideology and colonial movement,” he explains.

However, the Zionist movement lacked a colonial metropole from which to muster the armed force required to seize land from its indigenous inhabitants of Palestine. Theodor Herzl and other Zionists from this period petitioned a number of European states, seeking a sponsor of their project, as well as looking for private investors. In this search, Herzl stated, “[A]ntisemites will become our most loyal friends, antisemitic nations will become our allies.” The close alliance today of Israel and far right governments and openly fascist political parties and individuals has its roots in this strategic conception.

Daher lays out how in 1918 the British saw the emergence of a Zionist state as a necessary buffer and “geographically, virtually the center of the British Empire,” in the words of British Conservative party member Leo Amery. In many ways, this investment in Israel only strengthened after World War II as the unprecedented decades of economic growth and emergence of U.S. industrial and military dominance was fueled by oil.

“The development of industrial society,” Daher writes, “meant that oil became the strategic energy par excellence, the raw material without which the entire political and economic edifice of the developed countries was in danger of collapsing.” The oil reserves of the region—the largest in the world—were important as a driver of accumulation in the global economy, not just for simple extraction of the raw material. Daher points out how petrodollars played a “decisive role” in the development of the Eurodollar market and U.S. Treasury bonds, thus assisting the consolidation of the global hegemony of the U.S. dollar.

“Financialization of the world economy,” he observes, “was in part preceded by the integration of the Gulf monarchies into the financial circuits of the world.” Daher emphasizes that, as a result, “the nature of classes and the type of states that emerge in the Gulf region are very much linked to the development of the capitalist world market.” This has profound implications for Palestine and its connection to the broader region, a central theme of Daher’s most important contribution. With elegant brevity, Daher shows how geopolitical interests drove the solid U.S. support for Israel, as well as its orientation on the region (see the Carter Doctrine, among others), and therefore established the important function of the Saudi kingdom in the region as a key partner in U.S. imperial strategy.

Daher demonstrates that Marxism and anticapitalist analysis are essential for understanding the politics of the region—and the social movements that have arisen there. In particular, he offers thoughtful analyses of Arab nationalism and Islamic fundamentalism, both of which he sees as political dead ends.

Arab nationalism, which dominated regional politics for many decades, advocated a “gradual social transformation of the socio-economic structures” inherited from colonialism. While in some quarters Arab nationalism had radical socialist currents or aspirations, its politics ultimately relied on a project to develop a new national bourgeoisie.

With a strong state at its core, this developmentalist model bears many similarities to other anticolonial experiments of the late 1960s in the so-called Third World. This brief attempt to coalesce countries that were not aligned with either the United States or the Soviet Union in the Cold War meant that political leaders such as Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt played a role that extended far beyond just that of the Middle East region.

However, the limitations of these “state capitalist” projects still tied to the profit-driven, crisis-prone dynamics of world capital meant they stagnated along with global trends, were especially impacted because of imperialist competition, and social democratic aspects of the states were rapidly curtailed. Especially after the crushing military defeat of Syria and Egypt by Israel in 1967, a number of them sought rapprochement with the Western capitalist powers and their Gulf cronies and worked to demobilize and repress internal left-wing movements. This process consolidated a series of top-down, undemocratic regimes, propped up by imperial forces.

This historical dynamic, Daher argues, illuminates the political rise of Islamic fundamentalism across the region. The failure of many of the Arab nationalist projects created space that was filled with various political organizations rooted in Islamic fundamentalist thought. Daher describes how many states, at the behest of and with the assistance of imperial powers, “exploited … confessional fundamentalism to achieve … counter-revolutionary objectives.”

Here it is important to note that Daher’s analysis risks painting with too broad of a brush. We should not minimize the many differences among, for example, the Muslim Brotherhood, Hezbollah, and the theocratic state in Iran. Daher notes, though, that the base of many of these groupings is in the petty bourgeoisie, while also being rooted in the impoverished sections of the peasantry, working class, and disaffected urban poor. This creates a fundamental contradiction for these parties, Daher notes: “On the one hand, they profess a commitment to equality and social justice that they address mainly through top-down charitable projects. On the other, they advocate neoliberal economic principles and denounce social movements from below especially the trade union movement.”

Daher describes how these contradictions have deepened as both the Muslim Brotherhood and Hezbollah have carried out a process of “bourgeoisification” that is both the result of and drives the deepened ties to the regional bourgeoisie (particularly the Saudi kingdom), even while they attempt to maintain a cross-class base of support. This integrates the Islamic parties in the imperial circuits established by capitalism.

Daher points out that Hamas is somewhat of an exception to some of these trends, given the limitation on significant capitalist development especially in Gaza, which has made the process of bourgeoisification more limited.

Daher lays out his criticisms of Hamas with great care. While not lending “communist coloring” to the organization, he also clearly articulates the need to support “legitimate struggle against foreign occupation regardless of the nature of its leadership.” His clarity here is important as I have pointed out elsewhere how criticism of Hamas has to avoid the ideological minefield of Zionist backlash and islamophobia that slides away from principled support of resistance against occupation and colonialism, including its armed form.

A strategy to win liberation for Palestine must consider its regional context. This explains why both Arab nationalism and Islamic fundamentalism have at minimum failed to yield victory to the cause of Palestine—and have at times even betrayed it.

Both Arab nationalism and Islamic fundamentalism have oriented their strategies on alliances with and integration with regional powers that stultify the struggle for Palestinian liberation.

As Abduljawad Omar poignantly argued in a recent essay, “The Arab state system, locked in its obsessive self-preservation and desperate to maintain Western favor, suffocates the cry of Palestine within its people’s hearts. These regimes, indifferent to the charred bodies before them, circulate images of horror, not to galvanize but to pacify—to teach the dreamers among them the cost of rebellion, the brutal certainty of their suppression.”

Daher points out that many of the Palestinian political factions from Fateh and Hamas, as well those of the Left, have not defined a strategic alternative to the courting of regional alliances with Syria, Iran, and Egypt, among others. This approach, especially in the case of Fateh and its entrenchment in the Palestinian Authority after the defeat of Oslo, was rooted in the strategy of the building of a Palestinian state in exile or in waiting and winning the backing for this project by international powers, in the instance of Fateh even in the vain and disastrous hope that the United States would serve as a mediator. This focus on state-building and diplomacy had an impact on multiple factions, according to Yezid Sayigh’s comprehensive study of the armed struggle, Armed Struggle and the Search for State, in that they “placed political consolidation and control at a higher premium than social mobilization and transformation.”

One weakness of Daher’s book is its limited analysis of why groups like the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP) reached the political impasse they did. Daher’s basic argument is that “unfortunately, the Palestinian left has, essentially, implemented its own version of the same strategy” or regional alliances with states identified as “progressive.” Their recent positions on recent events in Syria reflect this contorted logic. To give one stark example, PFLP expressed support for the previous Assad regime and provided cover for its scorched earth counter-revolution, even when it was waged against Palestinian refugees in the Yarmouk refugee camp, arguing that Damascus will “remain a thorn in the face of the Zionist enemy and its allies.”

Consider, however, Benjamin Netanyahu’s remark, “We haven’t had a problem with the Assad regime, for 40 years not a single bullet was fired on the Golan heights.” When this regime collapsed recently, the PFLP’s initial statements focused on the need for “unity against Zionist aggression” trying to “exploit” the “internal situation” of Syria (my translation). The awkward dissonance of this statement being issued as the streets of Syria’s cities flooded with joyful celebration and the prison gates of Assad’s archipelago of torture chambers was being torn open reveals the bankruptcy of focusing on repressive states, rather than the toiling masses they repress, as the agents of liberation.

In the days after demonstrations of ordinary Syrians marched on the invading Israeli army, doing more to confront Israel than Assad had in decades of rule, Israeli military and intelligence chiefs rushed off the Egypt to collaborate with the Sisi regime, concerned that the overthrow of the Syrian government could embolden protests in Jordan and Egypt that would be a threat to Israel. These concerns led to Israel carrying out a massive bombing campaign on weapons depots in Syria, as well as stepping up the construction of a new security fence along the border with Jordan and deploying a new army unit to the eastern border region.

The threat here to Israel is that of the ordinary Syrians, Jordanians, and Egyptians rather than that of Hay’at Tahrir al Sham, which militarily overthrew Assad, as Daher outlines in his work on Syria. “This revolution is just getting started,” in the words of the riveting on-the ground journalism in Syria of Omar Hassan.

In addition to Syria the need for an alignment beyond that of regional alliances can be seen with that of Iran. Obviously, Iran and Hezbollah have provided support to the Palestinian cause in various ways. The question is if a reliable strategy to liberation can be rooted in the Arab state system. Here again this analysis helps make sense of the fact that Iran and Hezbollah’s support for Palestine, while it militarily defied the Zionist state and U.S. imperialism to a point, drew back and exposed itself as limited against the unchecked violence of genocide. Even numerous Hamas officials have noted that they expected more from Iran and Hezbollah. Daher’s analysis makes clear how this strategy cannot be depended upon.

However tenuous and shrouded in the dark smoke of genocide and imperialism, Daher is right to assert that regional revolt is central to the task of Palestinian liberation.

While he correctly asserts the right of armed resistance by Palestinians is legitimate, defends the right for the resistance to obtain arms from wherever it sees fit, and places the blame for the violence of resistance squarely on that of their Zionist oppressor, he argues that there is a limitation to the strategy of armed resistance of Palestinians alone as the path to liberation. (Contrast this with the founding statement of the PFLP, which argues, “The armed resistance is the only effective method that must be used by the popular masses in dealing with the Zionist enemy and all of its interests and its presence” (emphasis mine).)

The possibility of “united revolt” Daher advocates is grounded in the analysis of the interrelated forces of capitalism and imperialism in the region and its centrality to both the construction of the state system there and the centrality of Israel. This is why, Daher points out, there is a dialectical relationship between the struggle of Palestinians and the broader Arab masses: “when Palestinians fight, this triggers a regional liberation movement, and the regional liberation movement in turn fuels that of occupied Palestine.”

Two waves of popular uprisings—2011 and 2019—illustrate the fact that the region is engaged in a “long-term revolutionary process, rooted in the blocked political and economic aspirations of the masses.”

There are many examples of this dynamic. To give one critical example, the Second Intifada in Palestine spurred solidarity actions in Egypt that became the roots of the Egyptian Revolution of 2011 that overthrew Hosni Mubarak. Those events were encapsulated in that of the broader Arab Spring. Days after a Palestinian Authority called demonstration in support of Mubarak, thousands of Palestinians in the West Bank rallied for the revolution, raising slogans such as “The people want the end of Oslo” and “After Egypt, the dictators in nearby places will fall.”

Two weeks after Mubarak’s fall, Palestinian activists in Gaza saw the Arab rising as a time to “turn dreams into facts” and called for a massive march on Israel’s perimeters, with the simple goal to “return to the homes from which we were displaced.” This organizing coalesced years later in 2018’s Great March of Return.

In such dialectically interwoven struggles, Daher sees “the power to transform the entire region, toppling regimes, expelling imperialist powers, ending both these forces support for the State of Israel, weakening it in the process and proving to Israeli workers that regional revolution can put an end to their exploitation.”

This strategy needs to be resurrected. At one time, the forces of the Palestinian Left both championed this vision. In its heyday in the late 1960s, the DFLP argued for the necessity of “revolutionary mass struggle in each Arab state against its own ruling class that is tied, in one way or another to imperialist interests internationally.” In 1969, the PFLP argued, “The Palestinian revolution which is fused together with the Arab revolution and in alliance with world revolution is alone capable of achieving victory.” But intense repression, the difficulty of building an alternative to Oslo, and some political mistakes have taken a huge toll on the Left.

As the juggernaut of Israel’s ongoing genocide continues to grind down Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, and as the Palestinian Authority’s position as a traitorous enforcer of Zionist occupation is even more visible with its military campaign against the Palestinian resistance in Jenin, as well as its closing of al-Jazeera’s offices, the strategy outlined by Daher in Palestine and Marxism is more critical than ever.

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