THE US has reacted with fury to Russia’s ‘interference’ in the Middle East, that is, its invitation to President Assad to visit Moscow, and its current position that only the Syrian people can decide who is to govern Syria, definitely not the USA or the UK.
This US anger has been accentuated by Iraqi government moves to invite Russia to carry out the same anti-ISIS mission in Iraq, after it observed that US efforts have been extremely half-hearted. The US Chief of Staff, Marine General Dunford has just been to Iraq where he read out the riot act to the Iraqi government, that the US would not tolerate a Russian intervention in Iraq and would cease all support for the Iraqi government.
Despite all of Putin’s efforts to muster a common front against terrorism, the reality is that Russia itself is the ultimate US target, and the US will not take kindly to its authority in the Middle East being challenged. The crisis for the imperialists has been worsened by the Palestinian uprising that has erupted after 67 years of the state of Israel and 48 years of the occupation of the West Bank and Jerusalem.
The uprising of the Palestinians is spontaneous, with its established leadership appealing for calm.
The determination of the masses is being met head on by the Zionist ruling group and its various armed forces who in their enthusiasm to kill Palestinians are now killing people who either look like or could be Palestinians!
Leading this drive for a pogrom of the Palestinians is the Zionist leader Netanyahu. He whipped up the atmosphere for a massive state pogrom of the Palestinians when he told the World Zionist Congress that it was the Palestinians who were behind the Nazi holocaust and had encouraged Hitler to burn the Jews, whereas Hitler only wanted to expel them.
Even the German Chancellor Merkel has had to condemn this pogrom talk insisting that only Germany is to blame for Hitler. Now, with the situation getting close to the point of a massive uprising, the US itself, while publicly supporting Israel 100%, has had to intervene to try to calm Netanyahu down, and point to the job ahead. Yesterday, Secretary of State Kerry met Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu in Germany, and urged that there be an end to ‘all incitement’ and ‘violence’ against the Palestinians.
Kerry said he had spoken on the phone with Jordan”s King Abdullah II and Palestinian President Mahmud Abbas, who wants ‘this to de-escalate’. There is only one way to calm Israel down for the main task ahead, and that is to offer it lots of weapons.
This is why Chief of Staff Dunford has arrived in Tel Aviv to pledge negotiations whose starting point is that the USA is willing to increase its free annual aid to Israel from $3.1bn to $4.1bn dollars. The reality for the USA is that a strong Israel is necessary to maintain US domination of the Middle East, and that this domination is now under threat and has to be met, possibly by trying to suck Russia into a draining land war in Syria and Iraq.
Talks on military aid are now being discussed by senior US and Israeli military officials. The Israeli military are demanding a lot more than an extra $1 billion a year. Senior Israeli officials say that Washington’s promise of increasing the supply of military hardware to various Persian Gulf Arab states, concerned by the US-Iran deal, would also require a big response to satisfy Israel’s need to possess a qualitative military edge, sharper than all of the Arab states and Iran combined.
It is in this situation, where the Middle East is exploding in a series of wars and revolutions, that the international working class cannot just stand by and watch. It must support all of the anti-imperialist forces and realise that the imperialist foreign policy of war throughout the Middle East is only an extension of its home policy to make war on the working class.
The way to support the masses of the Middle East and Palestine in particular is to fight the ruling class at home, that is to organise general strikes to bring down capitalist governments at home and go forward to workers’ governments and socialism. The struggle of the Palestinian and Syrian masses is a part of the struggle for the world socialist revolution. It is high time that the big batallions of the working class in Europe and America joined the action to smash capitalism and imperialism on a world scale.
