Revolutions know no frontiers. The mighty wave of the Arab revolution has entered and motivated the class struggle in this citadel of imperialism in the Middle East. The strikes and massive demonstrations of the Israeli workers and youth in the last few weeks have been unforeseen for decades. The tremors of these events have been the most fearsome for the Israeli ruling class and the imperialists than all the other conflicts and contradictions exploding in this volatile region. The bourgeois media was shocked and has scrambled to rush away from reporting these protests and resilience of the class struggle in Israel as fast as it could. This uprising on a class basis has not only ridiculed their superfluous and deceptive analysis about the situation in the Middle East but has opened up new vistas for the Palestinian revolution and the solution of the agonising and chronic crisis that has beleaguered this tragic region for generations.This movement of the workers and youth in Israel has been inspired by the revolutions in the Arab countries and by the waves of protests and militancy in Europe. These protests had huge banners of Che Guevara and their slogans included, “Mubarak, Assad and Netanyahu”. Tents have sprung up in major cities, particularly Tel Aviv, for prolonged protests against the anti working class policies of the Zionist regime. The movement has spread with lightning speed and more than 150,000 people have come out in the streets in a country with a total population of around seven million. There is an astonishing 87 percent support of the population for this protest movement.Demonstrations had been called in five cities but in the end protesters marched through 10 cities: Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Haifa, Beersheva, Ashdod, Ashkelon, Kiryat Shmona, Modiin, Ra’ananna and Nazareth. In Tel Aviv 50,000 people marched from Habimah square to Tel Aviv museum. On August 1, the municipal workers went on a general strike across the country in support of the mass protests. From January onwards this year we have seen protests and strikes of different sections of the Israeli proletariat. These included government employees, dock workers, nurses, doctors, social workers, railway workers and many other sectors of the economy. The basic demands of the movement have been socio-economic that are gaining a political voice. Price hike, privatisation, low wages, unemployment, housing and the rising poverty are the main causes of this upsurge. It was the same with the Tunisian revolution and the other revolutions in the Middle East and North Africa, which the capitalist media tried to distort to prevent the triumph of the real aim of the masses in revolt — the socio-economic transformation of the system and society.Dafni Leif, one of those who led the call for these protests, hinted at the revolutionary implications of the movement’s demands in an interview with the Israeli website, Globes: “Greed and egoism have become the outstanding characteristics of Israeli society. But in the past two weeks, we have discovered that there are other Israeli characteristics…Our revolution is a revolution of awareness, to stand on the rights we are entitled to. We just do not want to change the government but the rules of the whole game.”Trotsky wrote in the late 1930s that the formation of a Jewish state in the Middle East would become a trap for the Jewish masses. The truth is that the conditions of the Israeli masses have been catastrophically falling for the last 40 years. The conditions for the Arab Israelis and Jews from Africa and Russia are even worse. These social contradictions have been brewing for a considerable time. It is the need of the Zionist regime to embark upon an imperialist policy to distract the ordinary people from these burning problems. They think that they can mask the class divisions by creating a fiction of the unity of all Jews against the Arabs. But these issues cannot be indefinitely undermined and put away. Those who suffer from exploitation and drudgery cannot remain quiet forever. Now the situation has reached a critical point. The revolution that swept from the shores of the Mediterranean to the Arabian Sea and across the region was bound to affect Israel. The Israeli youth and the workers are finding a new expression. This has set alarm bells ringing in the echelons of power from Washington to Jerusalem.The imperialist aid is mainly wasted in military adventures against the Palestinians and the continuing aggression of the Zionist state in the Middle East. Even then the largest chunk of the national budget goes to the military. Draconian austerity measures are being imposed with drastic cuts in social spending. The ratio of national debt to the GDP is stuck around 80 percent, which is proving extremely difficult to manage with the recession in world capitalism. The healthcare system is in crisis; government subsidy cannot even pay a living wage to the doctors and the paramedics. A large number of professionals are migrating back to the west. The wealthiest 16 families own 40 percent of the economy. The expenditures on the ‘settlements’ is seen with contempt by the ordinary Israelis. The conservative daily, Jerusalem Post, had to confess, “The revolt illuminates the forgotten side of the Israeli economy.”In 1918 through the Balfour Treaty the imperialists criminally began the division of Palestine to set up a Jewish state and unashamedly carved up the Middle East to maintain their hegemony through their policy of divide and rule. The different countries in the Middle East are artificial creations to divide one Arab nation. The historical significance of the Arab revolution is that the masses have risen on a regional scale to undo this crime. The imperialist powers fear nothing more in the Middle East than the class unity of the Arab and Jewish workers against capitalism, which is the root cause of their collective misery. After the mighty Arab revolution has arisen, the Arabs cannot be portrayed as a mass of people exclusively interested in destroying Israel. Similarly, Israel is not a single united mass that is the enemy of the Arabs. It is also a class society with irreconcilable class interests. Suddenly the Israeli and the Arab oppressed appear to have the same problems and the same needs. This movement has shaken Israeli society from top to bottom. A new epoch of class struggle has dawned that can salvage the oppressed masses of this region by the creation of a voluntary socialist federation of the Middle East. The writer is the editor of Asian Marxist Review and International Secretary of Pakistan Trade Union Defence Campaign. He can be reached at ptudc@hotmail.com