Israel has been waging a barbaric genocidal war against the people of Palestine, aimed at ethnically cleansing the Gaza Strip of its entire population. At the time of writing (27 December 2023), nearly 22,000 Palestinians have been slaughtered, and another 52,000 wounded in the Zionists’ indiscriminate non-stop bombing of Gaza’s civilian population. Of those killed, 70% were women and children. No distinction is made between civilians and combatants, with every civilian, presumably children as well, being targeted like combatants. High-ranking Israeli politicians, army officers and officials have openly stated that there are no Palestinian civilians.
If the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) suspects that one combatant is in a building and there are hundreds of civilians there too, the whole building is bombed, killing everyone. Quite correctly, Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham, has called the whole of Gaza a mass assassination factory. The number of Palestinians murdered so far accounts for a massive 1% of its pre-war population. Translated into US terms, such a percentage of deaths would amount to 3 million – larger than the entire population of some US states.
Almost 100% of Gaza’s population has been displaced and its infrastructure destroyed. Israeli occupation forces, through their Nazi-style blitzkrieg have been busy destroying every means of existence, let alone civilised life. Residents of northern Gaza were told by Israel to move to the ‘safety’ of the south, while its airforce got busy destroying everything in the north. Large numbers of those who followed this instruction were bombed on their way south; even ambulances were not spared.
Hospitals, school, businesses, mosques, churches, bakeries, UN buildings, housing complexes, cultural centres have been obliterated through merciless bombing. This war against Palestine is characterised by the greatest number of medical personnel slaughtered, the greatest number of UN employees, and the greatest number of journalists – all deliberately targeted and murdered.
The bombing campaign has been accompanied by a propaganda blitzkrieg which describes the Palestinians as “human animals”, “cockroaches” and “subhumans” who deserve to be “eradicated”, even “nuked”. So far, the Zionist air force has dropped 30,000 bombs – more than the US and British air forces between them dropped on the German cities of Dresden and Hamburg during the Second World War. More than 40% of these bombs have been 2,000 and 1,000 pound dumb bombs, that is, non-precise, causing destruction beyond imagination. 68% of buildings in northern Gaza have been flattened and their residents, if not murdered, thrown out to eke out an existence wherever they can find any space.
Having devastated northern Gaza, the Israeli air force is presently subjecting southern Gaza to similar treatment. Gaza, especially its southern part, is the most densely populated place on the planet. The pretext for this bombardment is that it is aimed at eliminating Hamas, when the truth is that this genocidal campaign involving the commission of war crimes on an industrial scale, is aimed at eliminating the whole Palestinian population through death, destruction and expulsion. But the Zionists will no more achieve this aim than the Nazis did in their campaign to eliminate the Jewish people from the face of the earth.
War on the West Bank
While the world’s attention is focused on the Zionist campaign against Gaza, its armed forces and settlers are busy terrorising and murdering the Palestinians who live in the Bantustans of the West Bank, with daily raids on Palestinian towns and villages, soldiers and settlers barging into Palestinian homes in the middle of the night and terrorising women and children. There is not even the pretext of the presence of Hamas, which has become a euphemism for the combined forces of the Resistance against the 75-year long occupation, in which Hamas doubtless does play a prominent role. Only a few days ago, the Israeli army of occupation destroyed a major cultural centre in the West Bank. It raided the famous Freedom Theatre in Jenin, killing 12 people, destroying all its equipment and stealing its computers. Quite rightly, the deputy chief of the theatre, Ahmad Tobasi, stated that the raiders should be called thieves and not soldiers.
The occupation forces are trying to eliminate all symbols and cultural heritage of Palestine – even waving a Palestinian flag is criminalised.
Who are the terrorists?
Calling Hamas a terrorist organisation will not save Zionism and its imperialist backers from an ignominious defeat which is as certain as the sun rising in the east. During their anti-colonial struggle of American revolutionaries against the British, did not the latter condemn the American revolutionaries as terrorists? Were not George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and their comrades given a similarly flattering characterisation? That, however, did not save British colonialism from doom. Likewise, did the US not condemn the liberation fighters in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, among a host of other places, as terrorists? None of that helped stop the victory of the liberation forces against the occupation armies of US imperialism and its satellites. There can scarcely be any doubt that a similar fate awaits the Zionist army of occupation in Palestine.
The Zionists have cut off electricity and water supplies to Gaza, and very little in the way of medicines and food is allowed in by the occupation forces, the purpose being to force those who survive the bombing to succumb to starvation and disease – a practice from which even the Hitlerites could have learnt a thing or two. The Zionists are attempting to do the same to the Palestinians as the Nazis did to the Jews – only their method is different from that of the Nazis: whereas the Nazis used gas chambers, the Zionists resort to wholesale and indiscriminate bombing of civilian populations. The Zionists will be no more successful in their attempt at a final solution to the Palestinian problem that were the Nazis in their final solution to the Jewish problem. The state of Israel is a colonial state founded on the expulsion of the Palestinian people from their land and homes; it came into being late in the day when colonialism was breathing its last. It will go the same way as other colonial states. Israeli attempts at genocide and ethnic cleansing are serving only to hasten the arrival of that day.
Israel loses all sympathy
The Israeli wholesale slaughter of the Palestinian people seen daily on social media has turned most of humanity against the Zionist monstrosity that is Israel, which has decidedly lost the battle for the hearts and minds of the people of the world. Even imperialist mainstream media have been compelled occasionally to let people have a glimpse of the reality in occupied Palestine.
There have been massive protests in support of the Palestinian liberation struggle even in the centres of imperialism, with hundreds of thousands of people attending these protests – in London, Paris, Berlin, and many other cities across Europe and even the United States, the biggest backer of Israel.
IDF kills Israeli hostages
Notwithstanding its bombast and fascistic intent, Israel will not be able to eliminate the Resistance to its occupation. Its soldiers and reservists, being occupiers bereft of a just cause, are unable to match the determination and courage of the Palestinian fighters who are fighting a just war of liberation, for whom it is an existential struggle. Not surprisingly, then, since the eruption of the latest fighting, over half a million Israelis with dual citizenship have fled Israel. Israeli soldiers are frightened of their own shadows and in panic shoot randomly in all directions. On 15 December in Shejaiya they killed three Israelis who had somehow managed to escape from detention in Gaza, ‘mistaking’ them for Resistance fighters although they spoke Hebrew and were seeking to surrender, shirtless to show they were unarmed and waving a white flag – hardly an example of bravery. The Israeli military said in a statement that “the IDF expresses deep remorse over the tragic incident and sends its heartfelt condolences”.
The Israeli prime minister Netanyahu called the killing of these three men “an unbearable tragedy”.
While the killing of three Jewish persons is characterised as “an unbearable tragedy”, and deep remorse is expressed, the killing of 22,000 Palestinians evokes no such remorse and is not treated as tragedy. This can only be that, blinded by the dead end racist ideology of Zionism, the Israeli ruling class regards Jews as the chosen people, with utter contempt for the Palestinians; while oppressing the Palestinians it cultivates the aura of victimhood even though nowhere in the world are Jews an oppressed people. For the Zionists, there is only one Holocaust, namely the murder of 5-6 million Jews by the Nazis. Dozens of other Holocausts, including the wiping out of the indigenous populations of north America, Canada, Latin America and Australia, do not come under this category, let alone what they are doing to the Palestinians. The Zionist ideology blinds the Zionists to the suffering of other people. Be that as it may, Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant has vowed that “Israel would remain resilient and continue operating – for the hostages, for our citizens and for our soldiers”.
Imperialist backing of genocide
It is not Israeli resilience that keeps the murder machine going; it is the backing it receives from imperialist countries, especially the US. The US is not merely sanctioning the Israeli genocide in Gaza; it is actually facilitating it through military, economic and diplomatic support. Planeloads of military materiel – bombs, shells – are being delivered each day by the US to the Israeli armed forces. As Max Blumenthal of GrayZone has pointed out, the US could stop the slaughter in Gaza within one hour if it wanted to. All the Biden administration has to do is to make a telephone call to the Israeli prime minister to the effect that there would be no more spare parts for the F16 fighter planes, no more F35s, and no more military, economic and diplomatic support for Israel’s genocide.
Instead the US government is saying to the Israelis: “Please be careful”. Bypassing the US Congress, the US government has sent millions of dollars’ worth of military equipment to the Israeli murder machine on the pretext of responding to an acute emergency threatening the interests of US national security.
The US has used its veto in the UN Security Council to thwart a resolution calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. A similar resolution was brought to the UN General Assembly where it passed with 153 countries voting in favour plus just over two dozen abstentions, leaving only the US, Israel and half a dozen countries to vote against it. Although the General Assembly resolutions are non-binding, this vote revealed the total isolation of the US in the court of world opinion; it also revealed starkly that Israeli genocide could not continue even for a day without the active support of the US. Even in the midst of the carnage in Gaza, top US officials such as Sullivan and Blinken keep repeating the sickening formula that “Israel has a right, indeed a duty, to defend itself against Hamas” and stressing the US’s continuing commitment to support Israel.
No right of Israel to attack in the name of ‘self-defence’
No, as a matter of fact, being an occupying power, Israel has no right to defend; on the other hand, being occupied and oppressed, it is the Palestinians who have very right to resist, by any means, including armed resistance.
Leaving aside for a moment the present fighting, ever since its founding in 1948 Israel has practised genocide and ethnic cleansing. At present there are 7.3 million Palestinians and 7.3 million Jews living in historic Palestine where Israel has firmly established a Jewish supremacist apartheid state which denies the Palestinians even a modicum of rights, practises institutionalised discrimination against them and controls their every movement and everyday activity. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have documented in their reports the state of apartheid in Palestine. None of this prevents the thoroughly immoral and corrupt imperialist spokespersons and media from describing the fascist Israeli state as the “only democracy in the Middle East”.
Anyone who disagrees with this false narrative is sought to be ignored and ostracised as an anti-Semite. However, this weapon is increasingly seen for what it really is, namely, a means of silencing opposition to Zionism.
But the people of the world, including the people of Europe and the US at last, have come to see through this hypocritical cant and begun to show support in very large numbers for the national liberation struggle of the Palestinian people. An increasingly large number of Jewish people in the US and some European countries are condemning Israeli genocide and standing up for the Palestinian people. This development has started to ring alarm bells in the camp of imperialism, whose governments are busy attempting to suppress all dissent, A recent Harvard-Harris poll found that, among the younger generation of Americans aged 18-24, there was wide support for Palestine; 51% said that Hamas was justified in its assault of 7 October against Israel.
Imperialist attempts to silence those denouncing genocide
In Britain the government is trying every trick to suppress all opposition to the government’s policy on Israel. In the middle of a huge demonstration in support of Palestine on 25 November, the London Metropolitan police arrested four comrades from the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist) for selling a pamphlet exposing Zionism’s reactionary, racist and anti-Semitic ideology. If the idea behind it was to suppress this pamphlet, the police and its masters in the Home Office have ended up lifting a rock only to drop it on their own feet as the sales of this pamphlet, following the publicity concerning our comrades’ arrests, have increased exponentially. For that we cannot but thank His Majesty’s police. It is a sign of the authorities’ weakness, not strength, that the sale of a pamphlet telling the truth about Zionism should make them resort to arrests. Nevertheless, it is a sign of the sharpening of class struggle, and the class-conscious proletariat should accept the challenge and rise to the occasion.
The future
Already, even before the genocide in Gaza has subsided, the imperialists are hatching plots against the Palestinian revolution, saying the Palestinian Authority should take responsibility for running Gaza and that a two-state solution must be implemented – the very thing they have worked hard to prevent from emerging. As to who should run Gaza, or for that matter the West Bank, it is up to the Palestinian people. The Palestinian Authority, thoroughly discredited for collaborating with the occupation, will not be acceptable to the people of Palestine. The people of Palestine have every right to choose their own government in a fair and transparent election, and not to have a government imposed on them by imperialism through its stooges and collaborators.
As for the two-state solution, it has been rendered impossible through Jewish settlements in the West Bank. There is only one solution, namely, a single state in which Palestinians of all religions – Muslims, Christians and Jews – enjoy equal rights.
Victory to the Palestinian Resistance!
Death to Zionism!
Death to imperialism!
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