In response to the 7 October attack three years ago, Israel unleashed a genocide against Gaza. The whole world watched as the ‘civilised’ West put its ‘free press’, police, guns and money unconditionally behind ‘Israel’s right to defend itself.’
But that slaughter had consequences in the minds of millions of people – today “everybody hates Israel”, as Trump himself put it. Worldwide revulsion and the mass movements it provoked made outright support for Israel politically dangerous.
With its continued rampage jeopardising even America and Israel’s own interests, America was forced to step in a year ago and imposed a ‘ceasefire’. To the relief of the liberals and Arab Sheikhs, Trump re-subordinated Gaza to an international mandate, under the dictatorship of a ‘Board of Peace’, chaired by himself.
Since then, with the Israelis continuing to rampage across six fronts, liberal collaborators have begun to distance themselves from crimes that, yesterday, they unreservedly supported. Public pressure has forced even the closest friends of Israel to express ‘concern’ and ‘frustration’ at the actions of the Netanyahu government – which they are at pains to separate from Israel itself.
In Britain, the new faces of the Labour Party – the party of Starmer, who defended Israel’s right to deny Palestine food and water – went as far as to confess “we got it wrong” and that protestors against the genocide “were right”. Alongside France, Canada and 19 other countries, they matched their words with a few sanctions and a piece of paper – the formal recognition of a Palestinian state.
They hope these concessions will be enough to pressure Israel to slow down, and for people to forget about their complicity.
Ongoing genocide
Shrouded under the spiralling Iran War, the suffering people of Palestine have disappeared from the headlines. But there was never any ‘peace’. Israel has slowed down, but it has not stopped its genocide.
It continued bombing Gaza nearly daily during the ‘ceasefire’, killing or wounding a Palestinian roughly every 90 minutes. It has expanded its occupation of the strip from the stipulated 53 percent to 65 percent, forcing the two million survivors into a 128 km² corner of what was already one of the most densely populated areas on earth.
With Israel still killing, Hamas refuses to give up its arms. The ‘ceasefire’ has been stuck in limbo on point one. The ‘international stabilisation force’ has not materialised. Neither has the money. Reconstruction hasn’t even started, and there is no sign it will do so anytime soon.
Look on Google Maps. Gaza is a wasteland. Millions of people are homeless, living in tent cities amongst the rubble with no protection from heat or flood. Living standards have collapsed. Annual GDP per capita is $212. Palestinians are surviving almost entirely on aid – which Israel is deliberately restricting to less than half of the stipulated minimum.
80 percent of all structures are still damaged or destroyed. As are 93 percent of schools; 94 percent of hospitals; 90 percent of energy infrastructure; 88 percent of water infrastructure; 92 percent of businesses. The mandate administration has only given out one building contract so far… for a military base.
In its slice of Gaza, Israel has razed even more of the depopulated waste to build more military bases.
Israel is transparent about what this strangulation and ruination is aimed at: ethnic cleansing. Last month, Defence Minister Katz explained that Israel is “organised and prepared to get them out” because “there is no real solution for Gaza in the end without this migration.”
Their ambitions extend far beyond Gaza. Under the cover of another ‘ceasefire’, it is cleansing Southern Lebanon. It has effectively annexed the West Bank. There, cities are being strangled to the point of collapse, and villages are being cleared by unprecedented numbers of attacks by armed settlers – aided and abetted by the IDF. The extremists hope the intolerable situation will provoke another uprising, which would open up a new front and give an excuse to expel the Palestinians altogether.
The settlers in power are explicit: they are striving to finish what Israel began with the Nakba. They want a regionally-hegemonic ‘Greater Israel’, completely cleared of the native population. That may not be what the so-called ‘liberal Zionists’ admit or want, but that is de facto what the IDF and the settlers are attempting.
Ongoing complicity
Netanyahu has pushed things to the limit. But this catastrophe has been in preparation for 78 years.
Israel was founded on the forcible expulsion of Palestinians. It has been occupying and oppressing them ever since. Because it is a bulwark of their imperialist interests in the Middle East, the western powers have stood behind it the entire time.
For most of the time, they have turned a blind eye to the suffering of the Palestinians. But more than once, they have been forced to step in and manage the oppression through ‘Peace Accords’ and ‘ceasefires’, to calm down resistance and public outcry.
The ‘two-state solution’ has played the same role. It has been used as a crowd-pleasing mirage. Really, there can be no lasting justice or peace in any form so long as the Palestinians – state or no – live alongside the imperialist Zionist power, backed by the most powerful country in world history.
Morality does not enter into it – neither does genocide. They are criticising Israel now because it is imperilling their interests at home and abroad. Decades of impunity and unlimited support have created a Frankenstein’s monster with its own rapacious appetite.
Politically desperate, Netanyahu has pushed to carry out the maximum policy of Israeli imperialism in the shortest possible time, whatever the consequences. His relentless escalations have dragged the US into war with Iran, and have become a huge catalyst in the destabilisation of Israel and the wider region, the unravelling of US domination over the Middle East, and political and economic crisis everywhere.
But for all this, it is still their most valuable ally in the region. Their ruling classes are connected by a thousand threads and billions of dollars, and it has been doing their “dirty work” for decades. They can’t just stand by and watch it get obliterated.
US taxpayers are about to pay for another $2.8 billion in military aid to Israel, including 40,000 2,000-pound bombs. To compensate for the wavering Europeans, Germany is surging €800 million in export licences to Israel – most of it reportedly for a nuclear-capable submarine.
Lesser accomplices like Carney, Burnham or Macron recognise Palestine and condemn Israeli “terrorism”, “illegal invasions” and “barbarism” in words – but they reaffirm their “unwavering commitment to Israel’s security” in the same breath. Britain’s planes and France’s missiles still defend Israeli skies. They all still trade tens of millions in arms with Israel. Their hollow concessions and crocodile tears, forced out of them by intolerable political pressure, have only succeeded in annoying Netanyahu.
Those who dare to protest their criminal hypocrisy are still censored, slandered as ‘anti-semites’, truncheoned and locked up as terrorists. Meanwhile, Netanyahu and all Israel’s genocidaires walk free, unpunished for one of the greatest atrocities in modern history.
Only revolution can free Palestine!
The imperialists would back Israel until there was no Palestine left if they could get away with it. They do not care. It was the mass movement in solidarity with Palestine – up to and including the general strikes in Italy – which forced them to feign concern for the plight of the Palestinian people
Over three years, tens of millions of people have been radicalised by the genocide in Gaza. For the generation now entering the struggle, it has been the most glaring demonstration of the real nature of the ‘democratic’ West. It implicated and exposed their ‘rules-based order’, ‘humanitarian’ foreign policy, their ‘freedom of the press’, their ‘law and order’.
It exposed imperialism more clearly than ever, and self-evidently connected the struggle against abominations abroad to the struggle against the war criminals at home. That is why they cracked down so hard against it.
It became a lightning rod, channelling reserves of pent-up anger against this screaming injustice. Protests spread over every continent, across schools, universities, the arts, and workplaces.
All this rattled the establishment. But the leadership of these protests everywhere confined them to exerting moral and political pressure. After months of repeated A-to-B marches, the wave was exhausted, having won words – but not deeds. Three years of genocide have shown what that was worth.
Wake up! Palestine is being destroyed. And it is just one of many horrors unfolding around the world, with the active assistance of our own ruling classes. The bloodletting of Ukraine; another genocide in Sudan; the spiralling nightmare the US and Israel are inflicting on the Middle East. They threaten to drag us all to hell.
Enough with words. We need action that turns the potential power of solidarity for Palestine into an unstoppable force.
Exactly one year ago, the Italian workers showed us how to do it. As French workers ‘blocked everything’ and Gen Z toppled governments in Nepal and Madagascar, they launched two mighty general strikes in solidarity with Gaza. At the same time, dockers across the continent were organising a coordinated workers’ boycott of shipments to Israel.
Our class builds the world. Mobilised, it could paralyse the war machine and force – not ask for – a halt. It is the only force in society with the interest and the power to end this madness.
Today, Europe has reignited, and the flames are leaping even higher than last year. Rebellion is spreading from France and Spain across Europe. This time, students are fighting austerity, exploitation and police brutality. But it is no surprise that, in France, Palestine flags are waved on every demo and barricade – while Israeli flags fly over town halls.
As the deepening crisis is making apparent, the fight to free Palestine and the fight against repression, militarism and austerity are the fight against the same enemy: imperialism. That is not a fight against this or that individual, or policy – it is a fight against their system as a whole, the highest stage of capitalism.
For Palestine to live, for us to live, imperialism must die! The urgent task confronting communists is to build a party capable of giving the working class as a whole the leadership it deserves; a revolutionary party that draws together all the anger, all the movements of revolt into a powerful force able to put an end to a system that outlived its purpose long ago.
