Introduction to "Gaza: Ghastly Window on Global Capitalism's Crisis"
https://www.laprogressive.com/economic-equality/gaza-ghastly-window
Our revolutionary methodology helps understand how capital’s drive to accumulate surplus value shapes, and is shaped by, the conditions and struggles of nationally and gender oppressed peoples. William I. Robinson and Hoai-An Nguyen apply this method in their article ”Gaza: A Ghastly Window into the Crisis of Global Capitalism.”
Israel used to rely on cheap Palestinian labor but, beginning in the 1990s, globalization allowed Israel to replace Palestinian labor with Asian, African and other workers who had no claim to the land and, as immigrants, no political rights. After the first intifada, the Israeli government sealed off Palestinians in occupied territories, and accelerated settlements and ethnic cleansing. Since then, Israeli-origin capital has been integrating more deeply with transnational firms originating in the EU, the Americas, Asia and the Gulf. Although the Arab masses have shown great sympathy for Palestinians, common class interests have driven the Arab ruling classes toward co-investment and accommodation with Israel’s rulers.
“The Palestinian masses have gone from serving as a tightly-controlled and super-exploited labor force for Israeli and transnational capital to surplus humanity standing in the way of a new round of capitalist expansion,” the authors say. In December 2023, an Israeli real estate company notorious for building settlements published an ad for constructing luxury homes in bombed out Gaza neighborhoods. Other capitalists are exploring a long- dormant plan to build a Ben Gurion Canal as an alternative to the Egyptian-run Suez Canal, running out to the Mediterranean through Gaza—with only Palestinians standing in the way.
Check out this article for the essential depth and context it gives to understanding the genocidal war on Palestinians. The authors conclude that:
In the context of a transnational capitalism in crisis genocide becomes profitable to the extent that it is inextricably linked to opening up new opportunities for accumulation through violence. Palestine has become an exemplary space for carrying out such a project on a wider global level, a site for the exercise of new forms of absolute despotic power that has no need for political legitimacy. This is more than old-fashioned settler colonialism; it is the face of a global capitalist system that can only reproduce through bloodshed, dehumanization, torture, and extermination
https://www.laprogressive.com/economic-equality/gaza-ghastly-window
- Juliet Ucelli, for the Liberation Road International Developments Work Team