On September 22, Italian workers staged a general strike and conducted massive demonstrations to denounce the Italian government’s complicity with the Gaza genocide. The principal slogan was Blocchiamo tutto (“Let’s Block Everything”), signifying a blockade of ports, roads and workplaces to stop shipment of arms and supplies to Israel, and to demand breaking of diplomatic relations with Israel. One of the unions termed Israel a “terrorist state.”
This is an event of great international significance on a number of counts.
1. There have been many demonstrations worldwide in support of Palestine over the last two years, but this is the first major working class action of this nature. The call was given by working class organisations, and other sections of society joined the marches. The massive response from the workers surpassed all expectations. Dockworkers, transport workers, metalworkers, teachers, government employees and others struck work and came onto the streets en masse. Schools and universities too were shut. It was a general strike.
The international media underplay the level of participation in this strike by referring to tens of thousands attending the demonstrations nationwide, whereas videos show crowds of tens of thousands at individual locations, in a strike that took place in more than 75 cities throughout Italy. Public support in Italy for the liberation of Palestine appears to be overwhelming. Even the journalists of the state-owned television broadcaster voiced their support for the strike on the air. Significantly, this is happening in a country ruled by a neo-fascist party closely allied with Israel and the U.S., and in a Europe clouded over with extreme Reaction.
2. Videos of interviews with Italian workers reveal that they participated in a politically conscious manner. Indeed, the strike was not about any immediate economic demand of the Italian workers; rather, it concerned the attack by imperialism on the people of an oppressed nation. The Italian workers’ participation in this strike could nevertheless accelerate their own class struggles in their country. This dialectic points to the centrality of the question of imperialism and oppressed nations in world developments today.
3. Meanwhile, several countries such as the U.K., Canada, Australia and France have suddenly decided to recognise “Palestinian statehood” in the abstract. Some well-meaning people might be deceived into thinking that this recognition of Palestine represents a shift in the positions of countries conferring it. However, firstly, this recognition of “Palestinian statehood” is devoid of a single concrete step towards it, and it has precisely zero practical significance. Secondly, those conferring this recognition include several states which have been supplying weaponry for Israel to ensure there are no Palestinian people left for a Palestinian state. As such, this recognition signifies no change in the basic stand of the countries who are conferring it.
Then what is the purpose of this ostentatious exercise? It comes in the wake of the worldwide abhorrence of the genocide being carried out by Israel in Gaza, which is reflected in the events in Italy and elsewhere. Along with this, the Palestinian Authority headed by Mahmoud Abbas—a faithful retainer of the western imperialist alliance—has lost any surviving shreds of credibility in the course of the last two years in which it has closely partnered the Israeli military’s depredations in the West Bank. Who now persists with the notion of a ‘two-state solution’? Israel itself has ruled out the possibility of a Palestinian state.
Objectively, then, the situation poses two real possibilities: there can be either a single Zionist state, or a single secular State of Palestine. For the alternatives to be posed in this manner is politically perilous for Israel and its backers.
It is to head off such a posing of alternatives that one set of western powers have conferred recognition of Palestinian statehood. This will help prop up the extant Palestinian Authority, decorating it with some legitimacy. In an apparent division of labour, another bunch of western powers, including the U.S. and Italy, have refused to confer recognition. We can now expect a debate between the two sets of powers on the question of recognition, which will engage the international media and serve as a diversion from the real question.
The Italian demonstrators have disregarded this entire diversion and straightforwardly placed the western powers themselves in the dock.
4. For two unendurable years, the principal tangible support to the cause of the Palestinian people has come from the people of the region, in particular the people and governments of Yemen and Iran, and the people of Lebanon, most of all the forces around Hezbollah. These forces have supported the cause of the Palestinian people at great cost to themselves. The protests by students in U.S. universities have been another significant expression of solidarity, in the heart of the principal imperialist backer of Israel.
However, the Italian strike is a major new development; we must await the unfolding of its full significance.