The Real Sides of the Conflict in the Middle East

From Commie Curmudgeon:

The three sources that I’m quoting below are very different in many ways, but they all seem to be echoing the same general idea, one which I hope will spread a little more over the Internet and well beyond it. That idea, to me, amounts to a truthful perspective on the conflict in the Middle East (not so easy to find) and points to the only effective way of opposing or even stopping these atrocities.

From Turn the World Upside Down:

...[T]he two sides in the conflict raging now in Palestine, Israel and Lebanon are:

#1. Ordinary people of all religions and ethnic groups in Palestine/ Israel/ Lebanon who want to live in peace with one another as equals (the opposite of Zionism's Jewish privilege and apartheid). This is the vast majority of people of all ethnic and religious persuasions.

#2. Those who are, or want to be, ruling upper classes, who want inequality, and who want to control ordinary people by setting them against each other along religious/ racial/ ethnic lines as mutual mortal enemies.

From Maxims and Reflections:

People will throw off this shit, nationalities and religions and all the other stickers we put on each other's kids saying it's okay to kill them, and we'll realize that there's only one enemy, the killers. The killers secure our allegiance by pretending to be enemies to each other. But the killers are playing on one team and we are playing on the other and we are losing.

And from the International Communist Current:

If all of capitalism’s peace plans are doomed to fail, what alternative is there to the imperialist disorder that dooms them? Certainly not the various nationalist/religious gangs which claim to be "resisting" imperialism in Palestine, Iraq or Afghanistan - Hamas, the PLO, Hizbollah, al Qaida… They too are entirely caught up in the logic of imperialism, whether striking out on their own or lining up directly with existing capitalist states. Their aims - whether the establishment of new national states or the dream of a pan-Middle East Islamic Caliphate - can only come about through imperialist war; and their methods - which always involve the indiscriminate massacre of the civilian population - are precisely those of the states they claim to be opposing.

The only opposition to imperialism is the resistance of the working class against exploitation, because this alone can grow into an open struggle [against] the capitalist system, a struggle to replace this dying system of profit and war with a society geared towards human need. Because the exploited everywhere have the same interests, the class struggle is international and has no interest in allying with one state against another. Its methods are directly opposed to the aggravation of hatred between ethnic or national groups, because it needs to rally together the proletarians of all nations in a common fight against capital and the state.