Leading representatives of the Left Party have used the anniversary of the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023 to demonstrate their solidarity with Israel, which has been committing genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza for a year and is now expanding its campaign of annihilation to the entire region. This once again underscores that this organisation has nothing to do with left-wing or even socialist politics, but is a deeply anti-working-class and pro-imperialist organisation.
On X/Twitter, the former parliamentary leader of the Left Party in the Bundestag, Dietmar Bartsch, shared his party’s official poster for the anniversary, which reads: “Hamas massacre on 7 October 2023. Never again is now!” He wrote: “7 October 2023 marks a new level of terror against Israel. Not since the Shoah have so many Jews been murdered.” And further: “Israel’s unassailable security is the mother of peace in the Middle East and ultimately the guarantor of a two-state solution. When memory fades, barbarism has triumphed. Never again is now!”
In view of the unspeakable crimes of German imperialism and Israeli war policy, such statements are repulsive and nothing short of criminal. The real barbarism is that of Israel and its imperialist backers, who are committing genocide in Gaza and are now extending it to Lebanon and the entire region.
Israel is not the “mother of peace in the Middle East,” but the battering ram of the imperialist powers to subjugate the entire region. The rhetoric and methods it uses are reminiscent of those of the Nazis, who responded to any resistance with brutal collective punishment. As a recent perspective on the World Socialist Web Site explained:
Despite the constant efforts to hijack the remembrance of the Holocaust to justify the modern-day crimes of the state of Israel, it is Israel that is openly copying the savage methods of the Nazis. In one of the most notorious acts of mass murder by Hitler’s regime, after Gestapo chief Reinhard Heydrich was killed by Czech resistance fighters in 1942, German forces targeted the village of Lidice, seizing and summarily executing 173 Czech men. In effect, the IDF has carried out three Lidices in Gaza every day for the past year, targeting babies, children and women, as well as men.
Officially, more than 40,000 people have already fallen victim to the war of extermination against the civilian population in Gaza—the majority of them women and children. According to an estimate by the renowned medical journal The Lancet in July, as many as 186,000 people have been killed by the Israeli war and its terrible effects, including hunger and disease. In recent weeks, thousands have also lost their lives in Lebanon in the Israeli bombing, and tens of thousands have been injured.
All this apparently does not go far enough for Bartsch. In his tweet, he attacks the German government, which plays a central role in the escalation of the war in the Middle East, from the right. “An immediate conclusion by Germany should have been a radical departure from the previous Iran policy,” he ranted.
The export of knowledge and technology to Iran should have been stopped immediately, because the engineers behind the #Hamas bombs got their know-how from #Iran. How could it be that Israel was showered with hundreds of missiles from Iran one year after the Hamas massacre on the eve of the Jewish New Year? The West will only be credibly in solidarity with Israel when it stops using Islamist groups and governments for its geopolitical interests when in doubt.
In fact, it is Israel that “the West” uses to advance its imperialist interests. Washington, Berlin and Brussels are seeking to establish imperialist control over the oil-rich and geostrategically important Middle East, in particular to be able to advance the confrontation with Russia and China. After the Iranian retaliatory strikes against Israel, Washington and Tel Aviv are preparing a massive attack on Iran that would plunge the entire region into a catastrophic war. Bartsch’s statement leaves no doubt that he also supports this escalation.
And in this he is in good company within the Left Party. There seems to be a real competition among the Left Party leaders to see who can most clearly regurgitate the official war propaganda and express solidarity with Israel’s war aims. On October 7, the still acting Left Party state Prime Minister of Thuringia, Bodo Ramelow, personally raised the Israeli flag in front of the state chancellery in Erfurt. The Thuringia state chancellery quoted him on its official Twitter account as saying:
On 7 October 2023, we were reminded of the deadly danger that anti-Semitism continues to pose to Jews to this day. People were raped, murdered and kidnapped simply because they were Jewish. We mourn with the relatives of the murdered and fear for the kidnapped – bring them home now!
This is the completely unfiltered propaganda spread by Western governments and the far-right Netanyahu regime in Israel to justify the genocidal mass slaughter. First of all, the Palestinian attack on October 7 was not an antisemitic pogrom. It was a Palestinian uprising against decades of Israeli oppression.
What exactly happened that day is still unclear. What is clear, however, is that many Israeli victims lost their lives as a result of the intervention of the Israeli military itself. The military launched a massive attack on the settlements where Hamas fighters were operating. According to an official United Nations investigation, the Israeli forces had “applied the so-called ‘Hannibal Directive’ and... killed Israeli civilians.”
It is also clear that the Israeli government had detailed knowledge of the Hamas attack plan. Nevertheless, security forces stationed along the Gaza border were withdrawn and redeployed to other locations just days before the attack. In the statement “ One year of genocide in Gaza,” the WSWS pointed out parallels to 9/11:
Indeed, there is a deep connection between the two events. The September 11, 2001 attacks were seized upon by the Bush administration to launch the long-planned invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, together with sweeping attacks on democratic rights at home. Likewise, the October 7 attacks were used as a pretext to implement plans long in the making.
It is only logical that on the anniversary the Left Party reaffirms its support for Israel and for the subjugation of the Middle East as part of the imperialist redivision of the world. From the outset, it supported the NATO offensive against Russia and Israel’s genocide in Gaza. On October 10, 2023, all members of the Left Party in the Bundestag voted in favour of a pro-Israeli motion for a resolution that had been tabled by the government parties and the Christian Democrats and was also embraced by the fascist Alternative for Germany.
Workers and young people who want to fight against genocide, world war, fascism and the associated abolition of democratic and social rights must politically settle scores with all capitalist war parties—especially the nominally “left” ones—and consciously turn to an international socialist perspective. This means becoming a member of the Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei (Socialist Equality Party) and its youth and student movement IYSSE.