The short-lived offensive of the Palestinian Liberation Movement on 7. October 2023, a brief
”anomaly” in the decades long oppression of the Palestinian people, has led to one of the most
brutal acts of genocidal violence in recent history. To legitimize this by alluding to ”Never again”,
e.g. the slogan of remembrance of the holocaust is not only cynical, but perverse.
The surprise attack by Hamas was punished with the flattening of Gaza, with the occupation of 2/3
of Gaza’s area, a suffocating embargo of all essentials – including water, food, medicine, energy
and clothes – as well as the total destruction of all water purification and power plants inside the
Gaza strip. The bombing campaigns and ground invasion have led to permanent displacement,
with residents living in tents for years while being continuously evicted by the Israeli military.
Disease outbreaks, rat infestations and starvation are the predictable results.
This is no accident. Already since 2007 the Israeli state has systematically blocked sufficient
supplies for Gaza. With the 7. October this policy of a slowly bleeding Gaza dry was transformed
into one of immediate physical extermination, but its underlying objective remained the same.
Destroy Gaza as a home for Palestinians and swallow it as part of Israel’s state territory. First come
displacement and destruction, then military fortifications and state-subsidized settlements.
The underlying economic reasons for the brutality of the Israeli regime are often overlooked or
seen as secondary. Israeli capital needs ”living space”; safe investment opportunities, raw materials
and transport routes. These are the same objectives as for any capitalist economy in its highest
stage of development. What makes Israeli imperialism more aggressive than many others is that it
utilizes the form of settler-colonialism, a form abandoned by most capitalist states today.
The needs of Israeli capital mandated that there cannot be a militant Hamas inside its state
territory, no neighboring Hezbollah and no Assad-regime that lets Hezbollah run supply routes
through Syrian territory. Neither can it accept a strong regional rival like Iran or a challenge to its
shipping routes through the Bab-el-Mandeb Straight.
Since the 7. October Israel has – together with its ever-faithful allies, the US. and EU – pursued
these objectives in a regional war, skillfully shifting its center of gravity from one front to another.
With Hamas rendered mostly ineffective in opposing Israeli claims, Hezbollah weakened, Syria’s
Assad-regime overthrown and the Houthi’s capacities in Yemen degraded, it set its eyes on Iran
together with the US at the start of the year.
The war is leading the world into a deepening oil crisis, adding fuel to the fire of the US initiated
trade-war and the heavy sanctions placed on Russia by both the US and EU. The world economy,
already heaving from the main imperialist powers trading blows, is entering a terminal phase.
And yet none of the participants of the bloody showdown can “help themselves”, as backing down
would mean renouncing their share of profits.
While Israel is slowly advancing and fortifying its ”yellow line”, swallowing 2/3 of Gaza’s territory
and squeezing its 2 million inhabitants living in tents into a tiny area, the highest population
density on the planet, the Palestine solidarity movement in many countries has a hard time
maintaining itself after the ”cease-fire” was announced in 2025.
What has led to this sudden decline without a significant change in the situation?
While there are many factors outside of the control of the movement, such as historical ties to
Palestine, the existence of a sizable diaspora, the existence of a pre-existing popular movement,
etc. we must analyze what we can influence in our circumstances. The most significant positive
example of Palestine solidarity work were the general strikes in Italy in 2025 and the strikes of
dockworkers in a number of countries at the beginning of 2026 opposing the general deterioration
of living conditions, but also the governments’ war policy and support for the genocide.
The main difference between these two is not that the Italian or Greek people are more ”radical” or
”militant” in their nature, but that there is, first of all, an orientation to defend working peoples’
interests against those of the bosses and capitalists. It is clearly understood that the interests of
workers and owners, or capitalists, contradict each other and that what one wins, the other loses.
And workers unequivocally win from showing solidarity with their class brothers and sisters
abroad.
The other difference is that there is no strict differentiation between ”political” and ”economic
demands”, but that they are seen as the same struggle in different dimensions. The struggle
against the genocide and Israeli and Finnish corporations profiting from it is not separate from the
struggle against Finnish capitalism and the exploitation of wage-labor.
Standing up for the interests of our Palestinian brothers and sisters today enables us to oppose
the Finnish exploiters in the next round of labor struggles and strengthens our organizations.
Strengthening the bonds between workers in their workplaces, in our neighborhoods and in the
Universities around economic and political demands, is the best defense against a further
deterioration in our living conditions and for ending the genocide. This is where we have the most
leverage.
The main thing is that we experience that we are not powerless as long as we work together and
don’t fall for supporting this or that “left” government, which in reality is nothing but a
smokescreen to continue “business as usual” – and war and genocide really are a “business”.
At this point we must make a brief detour to contrast this approach with the BDS-strategy (boycott,
divest, sanctions), which has been dominant in the Finnish (and many other countries’) Palestine
solidarity movement.
All three aspects of BDS ultimately fail to understand the genocide as a extension of the operation
of capitalism in Israeli conditions. It doesn’t aim at mobilizing workers, i.e. at their workplaces, but
at consumers, i.e. as individuals. It doesn’t grasp that genocide is not a hindrance to companies,
but that their morality is the more “flexible” the higher the profits. It sees the state as a neutral
arbiter between opposing social interests, instead of the guardian of capitalist profitability.
But we must have no illusions; there are no good capitalists. Every government, no matter how
“left”, upholds the system of exploitation of wage-labor by protecting private property. If the last
30+ years of the negotiations on a ”two-state solution” have anything to teach us, it is that all
capitalist actors participate in this farce only insofar as it helps them in Palestine and its people.
Incidentally, the “left-wing” Fatah has become a willing accomplice of the apartheid state.
If we seek to revitalize the Palestine solidarity movement in Finland we should take into
consideration that a broad and militant solidarity movement with Palestine can only be build by the
Finnish working class itself and that it will come into conflict with the Finnish capitalist class and
the various governments as long as it upholds the class interests of the workers and poor people.
The Palestine solidarity movement must merge with the broader efforts to organize Finnish
workers along this line; the line of class struggle and of international working class solidarity.
Jesse Kleinau / TKS