“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles” Communist Manifesto
The land grabbing and oppression of the Palestine community can be best described in the above text in the communist manifesto. Like in all societies existing in the world, the struggles faced have always been of one class in constant struggles to overthrow the other. While some downplay the Israel-Palestine conflict to merely religious-based conflict, some historians correctly characterizing it as racial tension between the two ethnic groups in that part of the world, the reality is that this is a modern classical primitive accumulation of capital. The most brutal of stages in the evolution and expansion of capitalism.
Just as we had seen this stage with Apartheid South Africa, the world witnesses the forceful grabbing of Palestinian land and its resources by the brutal armed Israel forces. The Palestinian youth and women each day are killed, the future of Palestine is destroyed and the prospects of freedom begin to diminish.
Just as South Africa had first witnessed the landing of the employees of the Dutch East India Company at the Cape of Good Hope in 1652, the infant representation of a class divided nation and bourgeois society in character. The settlers of 1652 were brought to South Africa by the dictates of that brutal period of the birth of the capitalist class which has been characterised as the stage of the primitive accumulation of capital.
Of this stage, Marx wrote: “The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in the mines of the aboriginal’ population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black skins, signaled the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief momenta of primitive accumulation.”
The question revolutionary forces must ponder upon is, what has become of international solidarity, what is the future of the left project? Is it enough for them to wage struggles in isolation of the Palestinian community?
The future of freedom in its truest sense of the word shall be realised when all free nations and revolutionaries of the world take up the gun to end Israel’s occupation.
Cde Athenkosi Mabona is a National Executive Committee (NEC) member and he writes in his personal capacity