Against Zionist settler-colonialism and imperialism — for a free, secular, democratic Palestine
Palestine is the defining anti-colonial struggle of our time. For over a century, the Palestinian people have resisted a systematic campaign of dispossession, ethnic cleansing, and colonial settlement carried out by the Zionist movement with the backing of the most powerful imperialist states on earth — first Britain, then the United States.
The Palestinian question is not a "conflict" between two sides with equal claims. It is a struggle between a colonised people fighting for their land, their rights, and their very existence, and a settler-colonial project that serves as a strategic outpost of Western imperialism in the heart of the Arab world. To understand Palestine is to understand imperialism itself.
For Marxist-Leninists, the position is clear and admits of no ambiguity: unconditional support for the Palestinian people's right to self-determination, the right of return for all refugees, and the establishment of a free, secular, democratic state in all of historic Palestine — from the river to the sea. Anti-Zionism is not antisemitism. It is anti-colonialism. It is anti-imperialism. It is the elementary duty of every communist.
"The main enemy of the Palestinian people are the imperialist forces, led by the United States, which support and maintain the Zionist entity. Our struggle is part of the world struggle against imperialism."
— George Habash, Founder of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP)The roots of the Palestinian catastrophe lie in British imperialism. In November 1917, British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour issued a declaration promising to support "the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people." The Balfour Declaration was not an act of humanitarian concern for persecuted Jews — it was a calculated imperialist manoeuvre designed to secure British strategic interests in the Middle East.
Britain had no right to give away Palestine. The Palestinian Arab population — who constituted over 90% of the inhabitants — were not consulted. The declaration was, in the words of the Palestinian-British historian Rashid Khalidi, "a declaration made by a European power... regarding a non-European territory... in flat disregard of both the presence and the wishes of the native majority."
Under the British Mandate (1920-1948), the colonial administration facilitated mass Zionist immigration and land acquisition while suppressing Palestinian resistance. When Palestinians rose in revolt during the Great Arab Revolt of 1936-1939, the British crushed them with extraordinary brutality — demolishing villages, imposing collective punishment, and executing resistance fighters. British forces killed over 5,000 Palestinians, destroyed more than 2,000 homes, and detained 9,000 in concentration camps.
The Mandate period established the pattern that continues to this day: the imperial power arms and supports the settler-colonial movement while disarming and repressing the indigenous population. Britain created the conditions for the Nakba.
The Balfour Declaration (1917) is one of the most consequential acts of imperial arrogance in history. One colonial power promised the land of one people to another people, without consulting the inhabitants. It demonstrates that Zionism was never a self-sustaining national movement — it was, from its inception, dependent on the patronage of imperialism.
The Nakba — Arabic for "catastrophe" — refers to the systematic ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1947-1949, during which Zionist militias and the newly established Israeli army expelled approximately 750,000 Palestinians from their homes, destroyed over 500 villages, and seized 78% of historic Palestine.
The Nakba was not a side-effect of war. It was the deliberate implementation of a long-planned strategy of demographic engineering. Zionist leaders understood from the beginning that a "Jewish state" could not be established in a land with an Arab majority without removing that majority. As early as 1937, David Ben-Gurion wrote in his diary: "We must expel the Arabs and take their places." Plan Dalet, the Zionist military plan of March 1948, provided for the systematic destruction of Palestinian villages and the expulsion of their inhabitants.
The massacres carried out during the Nakba — Deir Yassin, Tantura, al-Dawayima, Lydda, and dozens of others — were not excesses committed by undisciplined troops. They were instruments of policy, designed to terrorise the Palestinian population into flight. At Deir Yassin on 9 April 1948, Zionist Irgun and Lehi forces murdered over 100 Palestinian villagers, including women and children. News of the massacre was deliberately spread to terrorise other villages into evacuation.
The Nakba did not end in 1948. It is an ongoing process. Every settlement built on stolen land, every home demolished in Jerusalem, every olive grove uprooted, every child killed in Gaza, every refugee denied the right of return — these are all continuations of the same colonial project inaugurated in 1948. The Nakba is not history. It is the present.
"We must expel the Arabs and take their places... and if we have to use force — not to dispossess the Arabs of the Negev and Transjordan, but to guarantee our own right to settle in those places — then we have force at our disposal."
— David Ben-Gurion, Letter to his son Amos, 5 October 1937Zionism is not a national liberation movement. It is a settler-colonial ideology that emerged in late nineteenth-century Europe as a response to antisemitism — but a response that accepted the fundamental premises of antisemitism rather than challenging them. Where antisemites said "Jews do not belong in Europe," Zionists agreed and proposed to relocate Jews to a colonial territory. Where antisemites denied the possibility of Jewish integration into European society, Zionists concurred and proposed separation.
From its inception, Zionism allied itself with the most reactionary forces in world politics. Theodor Herzl, the founder of political Zionism, sought the patronage of the Ottoman Sultan, the Russian Tsar, the German Kaiser, and the British Empire — anyone who would grant the Zionist movement a colonial charter. The Zionist movement explicitly modelled itself on other European colonial enterprises, with Herzl writing in Der Judenstaat (1896) that the Jewish state would serve as "a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilisation as opposed to barbarism."
The class character of Zionism is bourgeois and colonial. The "labour Zionism" of the kibbutz movement was not socialism — it was the exclusivist labour practice of a settler community that systematically excluded Arab workers from the labour market through the policy of "Hebrew Labour" (Avodah Ivrit). The Histadrut, the Zionist trade union, did not organise Arab workers — it organised against them, functioning as an instrument of colonial labour displacement.
Marx himself, though writing before the emergence of political Zionism, understood the relationship between the "Jewish question" and bourgeois society. In On the Jewish Question (1843), Marx argued that Jewish emancipation could only be achieved through the general emancipation of humanity from bourgeois society — not through the creation of a separate ethno-state built on the dispossession of another people.
Zionism is a tool of imperialism, not a response to it. The Zionist movement has always required the support of a great imperial patron — first Britain, now the United States. Israel does not receive billions in American military aid because of the "Jewish lobby." It receives that aid because it performs an indispensable service for US imperialism: policing the Middle East and suppressing Arab national movements that threaten Western access to oil and strategic resources.
Lenin's theory of the right of nations to self-determination is the theoretical foundation for the Marxist-Leninist position on Palestine. Lenin distinguished sharply between the nationalism of oppressor nations and the nationalism of oppressed nations. The nationalism of an oppressor nation — whether Great Russian chauvinism or Zionist colonialism — serves to maintain domination. The nationalism of an oppressed people — whether Irish, Vietnamese, or Palestinian — is a progressive force directed against imperialism.
Lenin wrote in 1916: "The bourgeoisie of the oppressed nations persistently utilises the slogans of national liberation to deceive the workers... But insofar as the bourgeoisie of the oppressed nation fights the oppressor, we are always, in every case, and more strongly than anyone else, in favour of it, for we are the staunchest and most consistent enemies of oppression."
Stalin, in Marxism and the National Question (1913), defined a nation as "a historically constituted, stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life, and psychological make-up manifested in a common culture." By this definition, the Palestinian Arabs constitute a nation in every sense. They share a common language, territory, economic life, and culture. The denial of their nationhood by Zionism — exemplified by Golda Meir's notorious claim that "there was no such thing as Palestinians" — is itself an act of colonial violence.
Stalin further argued that the right of self-determination belongs to nations as a whole, not to settler populations implanted by imperialism. The Zionist settlers in Palestine, regardless of their length of residence, cannot claim a "right of self-determination" that overrides the rights of the indigenous population they displaced. A settler-colonial community does not acquire national rights by the act of colonisation — any more than the Rhodesian settlers or the French pieds-noirs in Algeria acquired such rights.
"Insofar as the bourgeoisie of the oppressed nation fights the oppressor, we are always, in every case, and more strongly than anyone else, in favour of it, for we are the staunchest and most consistent enemies of oppression."
— V. I. Lenin, The Socialist Revolution and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination (1916)The Palestinian resistance movement encompasses a broad spectrum of political forces, from bourgeois-nationalist to Marxist-Leninist. While all factions of the resistance deserve support insofar as they fight Zionist colonialism, the Marxist-Leninist current — represented above all by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) — has made the most important theoretical and practical contributions to the struggle.
The PFLP was founded in 1967 by George Habash, a Palestinian physician from Lydda who was expelled during the Nakba at the age of twenty. Habash understood that Palestinian liberation could not be achieved in isolation from the broader anti-imperialist struggle. The PFLP's founding document declared: "The Palestinian revolution is an integral part of the Arab revolution and the world revolution."
The PFLP's analysis identified three enemies of the Palestinian people: the Zionist entity, world imperialism led by the United States, and the reactionary Arab regimes that collaborated with imperialism while paying lip service to the Palestinian cause. This "tripartite enemy" analysis remains the most penetrating framework for understanding the Palestinian situation.
"The only language which the enemy understands is that of revolutionary violence... We believe in the people's right to wage revolutionary armed struggle to liberate their homeland from the Zionist colonialists."
— George Habash
Ghassan Kanafani, the PFLP's spokesman, editor, and one of the greatest Palestinian writers, developed the cultural dimension of resistance. In his literary works and political writings, Kanafani demonstrated that the struggle for Palestine was simultaneously a struggle for identity, memory, and human dignity against colonial erasure. Kanafani was assassinated by Mossad in Beirut in 1972 — a car bomb that also killed his seventeen-year-old niece Lamees. Israel has always understood that intellectuals and writers are as dangerous to colonial rule as fighters.
The PFLP's Marxist-Leninist analysis placed the Palestinian struggle within the framework of worldwide anti-imperialist revolution. This distinguished it from the bourgeois nationalism of Fatah, which sought a negotiated accommodation with imperialism, and from the Islamist politics of Hamas, which framed the struggle in religious rather than class terms. The PFLP insisted that only a revolutionary transformation of the entire region — overthrowing the comprador Arab regimes alongside the Zionist entity — could achieve genuine Palestinian liberation.
Since the 1967 war, the United States has been the principal patron and protector of the Zionist state. American support for Israel is not a product of domestic lobbying, sentimentality, or religious eschatology — though all of these play subsidiary roles. It is a calculated strategic investment in a reliable military outpost that serves American imperial interests in the most resource-rich and strategically vital region on earth.
The United States provides Israel with approximately $3.8 billion in military aid annually — the largest allocation of foreign military assistance to any country. This figure does not include additional emergency appropriations, loan guarantees, joint military programmes, and intelligence cooperation. Since 1948, the United States has provided Israel with over $300 billion in cumulative aid (adjusted for inflation).
What does the United States receive in return? Israel serves as a permanent garrison state that disciplines the Arab world. It has attacked or invaded Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, and Tunisia. It has armed and trained counter-revolutionary forces from Latin America to Africa to Southeast Asia. It shared nuclear technology with apartheid South Africa. It has conducted assassinations and covert operations on behalf of American interests across the globe.
Alexander Haig, Reagan's Secretary of State, described Israel as "the largest American aircraft carrier in the world that cannot be sunk." This metaphor captures the essence of the relationship. Israel is not a charity case. It is a weapon — the most cost-effective instrument of American power projection in the Middle East. Every dollar of military aid returns manifold value in the form of a regional enforcer that would otherwise require direct American military deployment.
The United States has used its veto power at the UN Security Council over fifty times to shield Israel from international censure. It has blocked every attempt to hold Israel accountable for its violations of international law, its illegal settlements, its collective punishment of civilians, and its systematic use of torture. American complicity in Israeli crimes is not passive — it is active, material, and indispensable.
"Were Israel to disappear tomorrow, the United States would have to invent an Israel to protect its interests in the region."
— Noam Chomsky, paraphrasing the strategic logic of US-Israel relationsThe Soviet Union was the most important state ally of the Palestinian liberation movement. While the USSR's initial recognition of Israel in 1948 — motivated by the hope of establishing a socialist-leaning state in the Middle East — was a serious miscalculation, the Soviet Union quickly recognised its error and became the foremost champion of Palestinian rights in the international arena.
From the 1960s onwards, the Soviet Union provided the PLO and its constituent factions with political support, diplomatic recognition, military training, arms, and education. Thousands of Palestinian students received university educations in the USSR. Palestinian fighters trained in Soviet military academies. The Soviet Union consistently voted for Palestinian rights at the United Nations and provided crucial diplomatic backing at every stage of the struggle.
The PFLP in particular maintained close relations with the Soviet Union, Cuba, the German Democratic Republic, and other socialist states. This international solidarity network — linking the Palestinian struggle to the Vietnamese, Cuban, South African, Angolan, and Mozambican liberation movements — was one of the most significant achievements of the socialist camp.
The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 was catastrophic for the Palestinian cause. Deprived of their most powerful ally, the Palestinian leadership was forced into the disastrous Oslo negotiations from a position of extreme weakness. The Oslo Accords (1993) were a direct consequence of the shift in the global balance of forces following the destruction of the USSR. Without the Soviet Union, the Palestinians lost their strategic counterweight to American imperialism.
This historical experience demonstrates a fundamental truth: the Palestinian liberation struggle cannot be won in isolation. It requires the support of a global anti-imperialist movement. The reconstruction of an international communist movement capable of challenging American hegemony is not merely an abstract goal — it is a material precondition for Palestinian liberation.
The deliberate conflation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism is one of the most insidious propaganda weapons in the imperialist arsenal. It serves a double function: it shields Israel from legitimate criticism by tarring all opposition as racist, and it cheapens the real horror of antisemitism by weaponising it for political purposes.
The Marxist-Leninist position must be stated with absolute clarity: anti-Zionism is not antisemitism. Zionism is a political ideology and a colonial project. Opposition to Zionism is opposition to colonialism. Just as opposition to apartheid was not "anti-white racism," and opposition to Manifest Destiny was not "anti-American bigotry," opposition to Zionism is not hostility to Jewish people.
Indeed, the most consistent opponents of Zionism have historically included large numbers of Jewish people. Before the Holocaust, the majority of European Jews opposed Zionism — the Bund (the General Jewish Labour Bund of Lithuania, Poland, and Russia), the Jewish sections of communist parties, and religious Jews who rejected the political instrumentalisation of Judaism all opposed the Zionist project. Today, organisations such as Jewish Voice for Peace, Jews Against Zionism, and many individual Jewish intellectuals and activists stand firmly against Zionism and in solidarity with Palestine.
It is Zionism, not anti-Zionism, that shares structural features with antisemitism. Both Zionism and antisemitism hold that Jews are fundamentally alien in the societies where they live. Both advocate separation. Both deny the possibility of genuine integration and solidarity between Jews and non-Jews. The Zionist movement historically collaborated with antisemitic governments — most notoriously the Ha'avara (Transfer) Agreement of 1933 between the Zionist Organisation and Nazi Germany, which facilitated the transfer of German Jewish assets to Palestine while the Nazis were already implementing antisemitic persecution.
Marxism-Leninism fights antisemitism — all forms of racial and national chauvinism — as a matter of principle. The Soviet Union criminalised antisemitism. The Red Army liberated Auschwitz. Communists fought and died resisting fascism across Europe. The struggle against antisemitism and the struggle against Zionism are not contradictory — they are complementary. Both are struggles against systems that divide, oppress, and exploit humanity.
The IHRA definition of antisemitism, now adopted by many Western governments, deliberately conflates criticism of Israel with antisemitism. This is a political weapon, not a scholarly definition. It is designed to criminalise solidarity with Palestine and to silence the growing movement for Palestinian rights. Marxist-Leninists reject this conflation absolutely and unconditionally.
The Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, launched in 2005 by Palestinian civil society, is the most significant international solidarity campaign for Palestine since the anti-apartheid movement. BDS calls on governments, institutions, and individuals to boycott Israeli goods and cultural institutions, divest from companies complicit in the occupation, and impose sanctions on Israel until it complies with international law.
The BDS movement draws directly on the successful campaign against South African apartheid. Like the anti-apartheid boycott, BDS targets the material foundations of colonial rule. It recognises that Israel's impunity depends on its economic, cultural, and diplomatic integration into the Western world — and that severing those ties is a practical form of solidarity that ordinary people can exercise.
The three demands of BDS are grounded in international law:
The ferocity of the imperialist response to BDS — anti-BDS legislation in over thirty US states, the criminalisation of boycott advocacy in France and Germany, the labelling of BDS as "antisemitic" — is itself proof of the movement's effectiveness. The ruling class does not criminalise ineffective forms of resistance. BDS is attacked precisely because it works.
From a Marxist-Leninist perspective, BDS is a necessary but insufficient tactic. It raises consciousness, builds solidarity, and imposes material costs on the colonial regime. But boycotts alone cannot liberate Palestine. Liberation requires the overthrow of the imperialist system that sustains Zionist colonialism — and that requires revolutionary organisation, not merely consumer activism.
Since 1967, Israel has maintained a military occupation of the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem — the longest military occupation in modern history. The occupation is not a temporary security measure. It is a permanent system of colonial control designed to facilitate the seizure of Palestinian land and its transfer to Jewish settlers.
Over 700,000 Israeli settlers now live in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem in over 250 settlements, all of which are illegal under international law. The settlement enterprise is not a rogue operation conducted against the wishes of the Israeli government — it is state policy, planned, funded, and defended by every Israeli government since 1967, whether Labour or Likud.
The system of control imposed on Palestinians has been recognised as apartheid by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, B'Tselem (Israel's leading human rights organisation), and the UN Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories. This is not a loose analogy. It is a legal determination based on the definition of apartheid in the International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid (1973): "inhuman acts committed for the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group of persons over any other racial group of persons and systematically oppressing them."
Gaza — home to over two million Palestinians, the majority of them refugees from the Nakba — has been under a suffocating Israeli blockade since 2007. Israel controls what enters and leaves Gaza: food, medicine, fuel, building materials, and even the caloric intake of the population. Israeli officials have described the policy as "putting the Palestinians on a diet." Gaza has been described by international observers as the world's largest open-air prison.
The repeated Israeli military assaults on Gaza — 2008-2009, 2012, 2014, 2021, 2023-present — have killed tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians, including thousands of children, destroyed hospitals, schools, mosques, and entire residential neighbourhoods. These are not "wars" in any meaningful sense. They are massacres conducted by one of the world's most powerful militaries against a captive civilian population with no army, no navy, no air force, and no means of escape.
"The Palestinians are not fighting so that the Jewish state will recognise their right to self-determination... The Palestinians are fighting because the occupier has no right to exist."
— Ghassan Kanafani, PFLP spokesman and writer, assassinated by Mossad in 1972The Marxist-Leninist solution to the Palestinian question is not a "two-state solution" — a formula that would perpetuate the colonial partition of Palestine, confine Palestinians to a truncated and non-viable bantustan, and leave the Zionist state intact as an instrument of imperialism. The two-state solution is dead — killed not by Palestinian intransigence but by Israeli settlement expansion, which has made a contiguous Palestinian state a physical impossibility.
The solution is a single, free, secular, democratic state in all of historic Palestine — from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea — in which all inhabitants, regardless of religion, ethnicity, or national origin, enjoy equal rights. This is not a utopian fantasy. It is the programme that the PLO originally adopted in 1968, and it is the only programme consistent with democratic principles and human rights.
The cry "From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free" is not a call for the destruction of Jewish people. It is a call for the destruction of a colonial regime — just as "End apartheid" was a call for the destruction of a racist regime, not a call for the destruction of white South Africans. In a free Palestine, Jewish people would live as equal citizens alongside Muslims, Christians, and people of all faiths and none — as they did for centuries before the Zionist colonisation.
But a genuinely free Palestine cannot be merely a bourgeois-democratic state. As Connolly warned the Irish movement, political liberation without social liberation is a hollow achievement. A free Palestine must also be a socialist Palestine — a state in which the land and resources stolen by colonialism are returned to the people, in which the working class holds power, and in which the exploitation of one human being by another is abolished. Palestinian liberation and socialist revolution are inseparable.
"We do not want to destroy any people. It is precisely because we have been advocating coexistence that we have shed so much blood... We are not against the Jews. We are against Zionism. We are not against the Jewish people. We are against the Zionist colonial project."
— George Habash
The partition of Palestine in 1947-1948 followed the same imperialist logic as the partition of Ireland in 1921. In both cases, the departing colonial power carved out a settler-dominated statelet to serve as a permanent bridgehead of imperial influence. In both cases, the indigenous majority was subjected to systematic discrimination and violence in the territory assigned to the settler community. In both cases, partition produced not peace but permanent conflict — which the imperial power then exploited to justify continued intervention.
The UN Partition Plan of November 1947 (Resolution 181) proposed dividing Palestine into a "Jewish state" and an "Arab state," with Jerusalem under international control. The plan gave 56% of the land to the Jewish state, even though Jewish settlers owned less than 7% of the land and constituted only one-third of the population. The plan was rejected by the Palestinians and the Arab states — not out of unreasonableness, but because no people on earth would accept the partition of their homeland to accommodate a colonial settlement that had been imposed on them by force.
Lenin's analysis of partition is directly applicable. Writing on the partition of Ireland, Lenin argued that partition serves the interests of the imperial power by preventing the unity of the oppressed people and creating a permanent garrison of settlers who depend on imperial protection for their continued privileges. The same dynamic operates in Palestine. The Zionist state exists because — and only because — it is sustained by imperialism. Remove the imperial support, and the colonial structure collapses, just as Rhodesia collapsed when it lost the support of apartheid South Africa and the Western powers.
The Palestinian liberation struggle poses fundamental questions for the international communist movement. It is the test case for proletarian internationalism in our era. Those who waver on Palestine — who equivocate between oppressor and oppressed, who call for "both sides" to show restraint, who condemn Palestinian resistance while remaining silent on Israeli colonialism — fail the most basic test of revolutionary principle.
The duties of communists in the imperialist countries are clear:
As George Habash declared: "Our enemy is not the Jewish people but Zionism and imperialism. Our struggle is against imperialism in all its forms." This is the Marxist-Leninist position. It admits of no qualification, no equivocation, and no compromise.
"To imagine that social revolution is conceivable without revolts by small nations in the colonies and in Europe... is to repudiate social revolution."
— V. I. Lenin, The Discussion on Self-Determination Summed Up (1916)The Palestinian people's struggle against Zionist colonialism and imperialism is the struggle of all oppressed peoples. Study the history, understand the theory, and join the fight for a free Palestine and a world free from imperialism.