Although Australia and Israel share a history of settler colonialism, workers here have history of fighting for Indigenous rights while those in Israel cannot, writes Paddy Gibson
An inspiring feature of the movement against the genocide in Gaza has been the solidarity between Palestinians and Aboriginal people, who share a common history of oppression by—and resistance to—settler-colonialism.
Both Australia and Israel are nations founded through genocide. Both are outposts of Western imperialist power in Asia and the Middle East. These are two classic features of settler-colonial states.
There are, however, serious differences between these societies. One of the most fundamental is the difference in the relationship of the non-Indigenous working class to both the state and the colonised population.
Marxists understand the working class to be the most important agent in driving progressive social change under capitalism, due to its structural position within the capitalist system.
Capitalism relies on bringing workers together and exploiting them to make profit. This creates an antagonistic and potentially explosive situation, driving workers to organise and fight.
Strike action can stop the flow of profits, winning improvements in wages and conditions and broader political demands.
Ultimately, Marxists aim to deepen theses struggles, organise workers to seize control of production and create a socialist society, where production is for human need and our planet.
But different settler-colonial societies differ in the relationship between the colonising power, the settlers, the domination of the Indigenous population and the emergence of a working class.
As in South Africa, where the white working class was co-opted by the state and played no role in the toppling of Apartheid, in Israel today almost the entire Jewish Israeli population supports the genocide in Gaza.
In Israel, unions are a fundamental pillar of the Zionist project. They have never mobilised for Palestinian rights and the Israeli working class cannot play any central role in the struggle for Palestinian liberation.
In contrast, unions have been an important part of the struggle for Aboriginal rights in Australia. The fight for Indigenous liberation on this continent needs an orientation to mobilising working-class power.
These differences can be understood with reference to the historical development of settler-colonialism, capitalism and the working class in both societies.
Colonisation, capitalism and the working class in Australia
The establishment of settler-colonies was part of the division of the world by European imperialist powers, an important feature of the emergence of capitalism as a global system.
In most colonial situations, the colonising population remained a small minority, involved in administration or military occupation, facilitating the hyper-exploitation of native labour and resources. In contrast, settler-colonies were established through mass migration from the imperial core to the new colony, often but not always to act as the main source of labour.
The main dynamic driving colonisation across Australia was the expansionist needs of pastoral capitalism.
In every Australian colony, pastoral capitalists controlled the new settler-states. They seized Aboriginal land and flooded it with sheep or cattle. State troopers, or supported settler-militia, annihilated any Aboriginal people who got in their way.
However, as a distinctly Australian capitalism developed through the late 19th century, an increasingly urban working class developed, exploited by the same capitalist class that dispossessed Aboriginal people.
Vicious anti-Aboriginal racism formed a key part of Australian nationalism and a system of formal Apartheid operated across the continent for much of the 20th century. But white workers in Australia had no material interest in the exploitation and dispossession of the Aboriginal population.
Everywhere, there were Aboriginal families who became part of the broader working class and joined unions. This helped create conditions for the workers movement to begin to recognise there was a common struggle with Aboriginal people against the bosses and the state.
Some of the earliest Aboriginal political leaders were unionists, including Fred Maynard, founder of the Australian Aboriginal Progressive Association in 1924, a lifetime member of the Waterside Workers Federation, and Bill Ferguson, founder of the Aborigines Progressive Association in 1936, an Australian Workers Union organiser in the shearing industry.
In 1931, the Communist Party of Australia (CPA) published a manifesto for Aboriginal liberation, based on the experiences of Black and white workers fighting alongside each other against the hardships of the Depression.
This program argued that the racism perpetrated against Aboriginal people was driven by the need of the Australian ruling class to dehumanise Aboriginal people and justify the genocide that lay at the foundation of their system.
Just as it was in the interests of all Australian workers to oppose imperialist wars being waged overseas, the CPA argued it was also in workers’ interests to fight against the brutal “protection” system controlling Aboriginal people—and to stand for Land Rights and self-determination. Over following years, white communists and Aboriginal activists won this as formal policy across the union movement.
Unions provided an important source of support for campaigns for equality and justice—from the Cummeragunja strike against a brutal reserve manager in 1939 to the 1979-80 Noonkanbah dispute, when the entire union movement banned drilling for oil on sacred Aboriginal land.
Of course, many non-Indigenous workers continued to hold racist and at times violent attitudes towards Aboriginal people.
Anti-Aboriginal racism is intrinsic to the operations of Australian capitalism, which is premised on dispossession. These dominant ideas are reinforced by all the ideological institutions at the disposal of the ruling class.
However, there is a material basis to successfully challenge these ideas because the working class are not settlers who benefit from Aboriginal dispossession. The more anti-racist, unified and organised the working class, the greater the gains that can be won both for Aboriginal people and the entire class.
Zionism, imperialism and economic development
Zionist colonisation of Palestine took place in very different circumstances, pitting Jewish workers in an unending military conflict with Palestinian people and the broader Arab world and over-riding class tensions within that settler-society.
The Zionist movement that emerged in the late 19th century was based on the idea of establishing a Jewish homeland as a settler-colony that would be a spearhead for European imperialism.
It was the support of British imperialism that allowed Zionist settlers to establish a foothold in Palestine after the First World War, increasing the Jewish population from 56,000 in 1918 to almost half a million by 1939.
Organisations based on Jewish workers in Palestine played a fundamental role in colonisation. Israel’s first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, said that without the Zionist union federation, the Histadrut, “I doubt whether we would have had a state.”
From its foundation, the Histadrut operated as settlement agency. It also excluded Palestinian workers and ran businesses that exclusively provided jobs for Jewish settlers.
While a small number of Jewish communists, part of the same international movement that led pro-Aboriginal campaigns in Australia, argued for the unity of Arab and Jewish workers against the employers and British administration, they never gained a hearing.
The Histadrut ran vicious campaigns to boycott Arab labour and produce. It founded a paramilitary organisation, the Haganah, that helped the British military put down a Palestinian uprising from 1936-38, led the genocidal dispossession of Palestinians in the 1948 Nakba and then formed the core of the new IDF.
After the establishment of Israel, the Histadrut controlled 80 per cent of the Israeli economy.
The economic development of Israel would have been impossible without the subsidies provided through the Western powers determined to maintain Israel as a settler-colony that served Western imperialist interests.
These capital flows and military support underpinned the state and provided Israeli workers with subsidised social services and guaranteed their employment, tying them materially and ideologically to the Apartheid state.
As Israeli socialists Machover and Orr argued in their important 1969 essay, The Class Character of Israel, “Israel is a unique case in the Middle East, financed by imperialism without being exploited by it.”
They also argued that “the permanent conflict between the settler society and the indigenous, displaced Palestinian Arabs” was the defining factor shaping the Israeli economy, its institutions and psychology.
This reality intensified after Israel’s victory in the 1967 war, the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and the construction of a comprehensive system of apartheid laws, settlement expansion and military dictatorship over Palestinian life.
Israel became central to US imperialist strategy for dominating the Middle East. This led to significant financial support from the US government, increasingly in the form of military aid.
Israel developed a serious capitalist class and the Histadrut and state-based industries decreased in importance. But Israel’s economy is now based on a high-tech sector connected to military production and massively subsidised by the US.
Israel is a garrison society where all Jewish citizens complete compulsory military service and the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) is the most influential social institution, tying the population to mobilisation for permanent war.
Opinion polls have consistently shown that more than 85 per cent of the Jewish Israeli population support the genocidal campaign in Gaza.
A socialist strategy to liberate Palestine cannot be based on the Israeli working class. Instead it looks to the revolutionary potential of the working class in the Arab states across the Middle East and North Africa.
US imperialism also relies on the support of Arab regimes, particularly Egypt, that repress their own population, driving periodic struggles such as the revolutions of 2011.
The deepening of such revolts into the overthrow of the existing order could cripple the Zionist regime. It will require the dismantling of the Apartheid state to break the chains that subjugate Palestinians and tie Jewish Israelis to Zionism, opening horizons for a socialist future.
Australian capitalism plays a key role in upholding the US-led imperialist order while exploiting workers and inflicting grinding oppression on Aboriginal people.
The Australian working class has a common interest to struggle with Indigenous people against racism, for return of stolen lands and against the imperialist system crushing the Palestinians.
