In response to the Oct. 7 pogrom in Israel and ensuing violence against Jews worldwide, masses of people opposed to antisemitism are coming out and joining the fight against Jew hatred worldwide. Israel is one of two fronts for the working class today, alongside Ukraine, both of which have changed world politics. Workers have an interest in the outcomes of these battles, especially those inside the countries who are fighting for their lives, posing the need for a decisive working-class course forward.
New York saw ten thousand came out on the 30-day anniversary of the Hamas pogrom, to defend Israel’s right to defend itself. “Israel has the duty, the absolute obligation to protect its citizens and its country,” Eric Goldstein, head of the United Jewish Appeal Federation of New York, said from the podium. “At the same time, we grieve for the suffering of innocent Palestinian civilians who are also victims of Hamas’ brutality.” The rally included defenders of Ukraine’s independence and non-Jews.
While Moscow and Tehran deepen ties, the Kremlin has grown closer to Hamas leadership, which emboldened an anti-Jewish riot in the Dagestan region a few weeks ago. “Ukraine and Israel are fighting the same existential war,” Olga Frayman, a Jewish member of Minnesota’s Ukrainian community, told the Minneapolis Star Tribune at a Nov. 2 press conference expressing solidarity with the two struggles, as reported by The Militant. Frayman and her parents moved from Ukraine, then an oppressed part of the Soviet Union, after the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear catastrophe.
And yet, opposition to Putin’s regime by working-class Russians, and scorn for Hamas expressed by many Arabs since Oct. 7 steadily grows every day.
Last week, in the U.S. and other major capitalist countries, during the 85th anniversary of Kristallnacht, manifestations in support of Hamas’ genocidal slogans occurred at universities across the world including the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley (UTRGV). Jewish students everywhere are at a peak for insecurity, unfelt for generations. Hate crimes against Jews have skyrocketed everywhere.
Kristallnacht, the “night of broken glass” in German, was a nationwide pogrom organized by the Nazi government in 1938. Having seized total power in 1933, Kristallnacht marked a turning point in the Nazi’s drive to exterminate European Jewry. Armed with knives, gasoline and other weapons of horror, Nazi thugs murdered at least 91 Jews across Germany, occupied Austria and Sudetenland (today part of the Czech Republic), raped hundreds of women; destroyed at least 267 synagogues and 7,000 Jewish businesses; vandalized cemeteries and schools; and destroyed an untold number of homes. This is what Hamas succeeded in emulating.
30,000 Jews were seized and taken to concentration camps, where over 1,000 perished. Kristallnacht was the beginning of what they called the “final solution.” By the time the genocidaires were toppled in May of 1945, they’d succeeded in killing around forty percent of the world’s Jews. To this day, world Jewry has not recovered, as the number of Jews in the world is still less than what it was in 1933. In some parts of Eastern Europe, up to ninety percent of Jewish communities were exterminated.
Nothing compares to the Holocaust, except that in some Kibbutzim communities in southern Israel, up to ninety percent of residents were killed by Hamas.
The coming to power of the Nazis is a reminder of the cost paid by humanity when the revolutionary working-class movements of the world fail to seize power. This was the case in Germany, where the labor and communist movements, millions strong, were prevented by Stalin from seizing power multiple times during revolutionary opportunities, like in 1924, 1929 and the lead up to Hitler’s rise in the early 30s.
Even during Hitler’s rule, Stalin signed a pact with the Third Reich, in 1939, known as “the Hitler-Stalin pact” which Hitler broke, to Stalin’s great surprise, by invading Russia. Stalinist betrayals of socialist revolutions in Spain, Italy, and in Greece and elsewhere after the war, would bring fascist parties to power there as well.
This, and America’s refusal to accept Jewish refugees during and after the Holocaust, is why the creation of Israel in 1947 was made inevitable. During this time of enormous political betrayal, it’s worth noting, the Socialist Workers Party (and its affiliate organizations worldwide) were the only political current to show solidarity with the victims of Hitler’s terror, Roosevelt withholding their entry.
Working people, more and more, are entering politics in their own name. Workers and unionists have been horrified by the Oct. 7 pogrom. Rufino Tejada, a retired tailor, told The Militant’s Seth Galinsky, “So much hate! There can’t be a ceasefire with a group like that.” Working people need to build working-class parties in Israel, the Palestinian territories, the U.S. and around the world, Galinsky replied, “that can lead the fight to take power out of the hands of the capitalists.”
Capitalism’s crisis is impacting the working class the world over. While the rulers in Tehran cheered on Hamas, workers in Iran have continued actions against attacks on their wages and political rights. A week prior to demonstrators becoming violent and vandalizing the White House and U.S. Capitol, others commemorated the death of the Kurdish woman, Zhina Amini, as well condemn the regime for its support of Hamas.
Meanwhile, capitalist bosses are continuing their assault on working people here and abroad. Sanitation workers with BCTGM Local 390G in Minnesota are on strike against International Flavors and Fragrances. Almost 200 union members walked out June 4 after working for a year under an expired contract. They’re receiving solidarity from workers all over, including picketers driving in from Chicago. A crucial front in the struggle against Jim Crow segregation, the Memphis sanitation workers are carrying signs that read, “I am a man,” as did those on strike in 1968, who Martin Luther King was bringing attention to shortly before being gunned down.
Hotel workers in Los Angeles continue taking to the streets as part of a rolling strike wave. Thousands of construction workers in Sydney, Australia are also out, demanding a ban on engineered stone, used for kitchen and bathroom countertops. Dust from cutting the stone causes silicosis, a deadly lung disease. Also in the U.K., in England, municipal workers are on strike against the Labor-party-run council.
And while the U.S. supplies arms to the just fights of the Israelis and Ukrainians, U.S. imperialism is not truly interested in the survival of the two nations, other than to the extent which they can aid its imperial interests. In the United Nations, 187 countries voted to condemn the U.S.’s blockade of Cuba, as it has since 1991. Cuba received words of solidarity at the assembly from 44 governments, including former colonial countries Cuban internationalist combatant volunteers helped liberate, like Namibia.
The U.S. rulers hope to strangle and kill Cuba’s socialist revolution, so it no longer poses as an example to American workers. American capitalists place their crisis on the backs of working people who are hit hardest, with rising inflation that lowers actual wages, as well as decreasing medical care for working people and families.
In Mexico, where a socialist revolution didn’t occur unlike Cuba, workers and farmers there continue facing a repressive police and military apparatus alongside reactionary drug cartels. Families of the kidnapped and murdered 43 students held protests, calling-out the Mexican government for working hand in glove with the cartels, at every level. Mexican workers, unions and organizations continue fighting for an independent class path, as the reformist “AMLO” has proven useless.
While both capitalist parties and reformist “third parties” are unable to provide any real answers for working people, the Socialist Workers Party stands alone in offering humanity a way forward, starting with leading the fight against Jew hatred. In the moments after news of Kristallnacht made its way across the Atlantic, the predecessor of the SWP immediately mobilized defense and solidarity for Germany’s Jews. They countermobilized 50,000 against a fascist meeting in New York, Feb. 1939.
The SWP was built on the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917’s continuity, the first workers revolution to overthrow capital and form a government based on its class rule, as well as the Cuban Revolution’s, the second successful socialist revolution. Society, class-divided, can only survive if workers transform it into a socialist society. Building such a leadership, to lead our class in transforming our unions and class-organizations into revolutionary instruments to achieve this historic task, is the SWP’s main objective.