Victory to the Palestinian resistance; no cooperation with zionist war crimes!
These are the slogans that need to permeate the solidarity movement in Britain and dictate its actions.
Early in the morning of Saturday 7 October, the Palestinian resistance in Gaza launched its most daring attack thus far against the Israeli occupation. In this coordinated attack from the sea, air and land, hundreds of Palestinian fighters broke through the high-tech fence that the zionist state had constructed to keep 2.3 million Palestinians confined to the small Gaza Strip, with their every movement controlled by the occupation regime.
Armed with knives, guns and grenades, Palestinian fighters killed 1,400 Israelis and wounded another 5,400 according to Israeli officials. Another 203 were taken prisoner and driven to Gaza.
At the same time, the resistance fired more than 6,000 rockets into Israel. Although the majority of the rockets were intercepted, quite a few managed to breach Israel’s ‘Iron Dome’ and hit their targets.
The audacious assault by the resistance shook the zionist rulers of Israel and their imperialist backers to their foundations. It humiliated the Israeli security services, who pride themselves on being the best in the world; it humiliated the Israeli army, unable as it was to protect these outposts of zionism that the resistance overwhelmed in its sweep.
Just when they had been feeling complacently confident that, through a combination of overwhelming brute force against the Palestinians and normalisation of relations with a number of quisling Arab countries, they had ‘solved’ the Palestine problem, came the bombshell of 7 October, reminding those who had been deaf to Palestinian demands for a just solution and an end to their 75-year-long misery under Israeli occupation and terror that, try as they may, Palestinians would not quietly retire into oblivion; that the land stolen from them by the zionists is at the heart of this conflict, as is the displacement of millions of Palestinians thrown out of their houses, towns and villages.
With this latest act of resistance, the people of Palestine have destroyed the zionist utopia and put the question of Palestinian liberation back at the centre of middle-eastern politics. There can be no peace in the region as long as the zionists, with full backing from the USA and other imperialist states, continue to occupy Palestine and to torture and oppress the people of that land.
The storming of the Gaza/Israeli border and the casualties among the settlers and Israeli soldiers were greeted by a barrage of hysterical condemnation of the alleged brutality and savagery of the resistance from bourgeois media and politicians. The leaders of imperialist countries without exception denounced the resistance as animals in human form, as did the organs of imperialist propaganda, portraying Israel as the victim of an unwarranted and unprovoked attack by the Palestinians.
Fake horror stories about the beheading of 40 babies were prominently splashed across the print and electronic media until, in view of the lack of any evidence, they were quietly withdrawn.
Since then, Israel has been conducting saturation bombing of Gaza, indiscriminately targeting civilians. At the time of writing, 8,306 Palestinians have been murdered, 4,352 of them children, while 20,000 have been injured.
The Israeli air force has bombed such ‘military’ targets as multi-storey residential buildings, schools, churches, mosques, hospitals, ambulances and convoys of people leaving northern Gaza for the allegedly ‘safe’ southern end of the strip. Thirty students, five teachers, a doctor, an engineer, a counsellor and three staff were killed at a UN school. Morgues have run out of space for people killed in the relentless Israeli bombardment.
Water, fuel, gas for cooking and food have all been cut off by the medieval siege of Gaza mounted by the occupation, creating a humanitarian crisis in a territory that relies on food aid, half of whose population lives below the poverty line, and 50 percent of whose 2.3 million population are children. All communications between Gaza and the outside world have been cut.
In violation of all norms of decency and international law, the Israeli air force bombed the Al-Ahli Anglican Episcopal hospital, killing more than 500 innocent civilians. The IDF had initially boasted of this bombing, but later disclaimed responsibility in view of the outrage that this stomach-churning heinous crime provoked.
Instead, it blamed the resistance, saying that the explosion had been caused by a misfired rocket launched by the Islamic Jihad. The resistance, however, does not have any rocket capable of causing such a devastating explosion as the one that hit the hospital. In fact, the damage was done by a JDam bomb supplied to Israel by the United States.
In the face of overwhelming evidence, and the anger aroused among vast masses by this war crime, even the BBC was forced to say that Israel had bombed the hospital.
Whole multigenerational families have been wiped out; 44 members of the Shehab family were massacred in an Israeli strike, including 16 children of whom the oldest was just 14 and the youngest only two years in age. Similar family massacres have taken place several times since 7 October.
Israel has made a special point of targeting journalists and doctors for assassination, bombing their houses and wiping out their families. There is no other way of describing the Israeli military except as Nazis perpetrating a genocide. Today it is the zionists who are the Nazis and the Palestinians who are the modern-day jews.
In addition, the settlers go about in the fashion of Nazi thugs, killing Palestinians while the Israeli army either joins them or looks the other way.
Yet the zionist and imperialist media portray the victims as perpetrators and the perpetrators as victims. They have weaponised the past suffering of the jews in Europe as a cover for committing genocide against the Palestinian people today. These criminals could teach Joseph Goebbels a thing or two about the art of fake propaganda.
Imperialist political and ideological representatives, along with their journalist accomplices, who gave vent to their ‘humanitarianism’ after 7 October, have been strangely lacking in humanitarian concern for the thousands of innocent men, women and children blown to pieces by Israeli bombers. They have thus shown that they are totally bereft of all human decency, concern for human life and objectivity.
They have lost all credibility and are complicit in Israeli war crimes.
US president Joe Biden, ignoring all evidence, repeated the Israeli lie that the hospital damage was caused by the resistance.
Political representatives in all the imperialist countries have lined up behind Israel with the sickening mantra that “Israel has the right to defend itself”, while the Palestinians who have lived under occupation for 75 years have no such right of self-defence. One after another, these bigwigs have visited Tel Aviv to show their solidarity with Israel and endorse its war crimes.
Israel has used white phosphorus in its attacks on Gaza and Lebanon, in violation of international law, says Human Rights Watch. Another crime curiously absent from front pages in the west.
All hospitals in Gaza are “at breaking point”, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO), which has documented 34 attacks on healthcare workers since 7 October, causing 25 deaths. Fourteen UN workers and 11 journalists have also been slaughtered.
Israel has ordered the residents of north Gaza to evacuate to the south of the strip, but evacuating vulnerable hospital patients is “a death sentence”, according to the WHO, which adds that asking health workers “to do this or leave those who need their care behind is beyond cruel”.
The WHO and the United Nations have called on Israel “to immediately rescind orders for evacuation” of 1.1 million people from the north of Gaza.
But the British defence secretary has no such concern, saying that Israel has the right to give due warning to the Gazans with the order to evacuate. Grant Shapps told BBC Breakfast on Friday 27 October: “What is Israel to do, leave [the resistance] to attack again or deal with them?”
For his part, Keir Starmer, the despicable leader of the equally despicable Labour party, has gone even further by endorsing Israel’s decision to cut off all water, fuel, food and cooking oil to the besieged 2.3 million people in the Gaza concentration camp.
Starmer’s backing for this and other war crimes of Israel has caused outrage among ordinary people, as well as in sections of the Labour party itself. For all that, the so-called ‘left’ of the Labour party continue their membership of this criminal imperialist outfit, while its hod-carriers – the Trotskyists and revisionists – continue their sickening endeavours in favour of the election of a Labour government.
The order for those living in the north of Gaza to evacuate has nothing to do with their safety; it is merely a device to clear the area of Palestinians and push them into the neighbouring Sinai desert, there to rot and be forgotten. For this stratagem to work, Israel needs Egyptian cooperation, however, which is unlikely to be forthcoming.
Besides, Palestinians understand the motive behind the Israeli order only too well. Precisely for that reason, the resistance has told the people to stay put, saying: “We remain in our land, homes and cities. There will be no displacement or evacuation.
“Our steadfast Palestinian people reject the threats of the leaders of occupation and their calls … to leave their homes and move south or to Egypt.”
For its part, the UN has said that it considers it impossible for such a movement of people “without devastating humanitarian consequences”.
Consequent upon the draconian siege of Gaza and the indiscriminate bombing of its population, Israel and its supporters have lost all credibility and support among ordinary people. Huge demonstrations have taken place around the world in support of the resistance, with people waving Palestinian flags.
On 14 October, London witnessed a crowd of 150,000 in support of Palestine to express anger at Israeli war crimes. On 21 October, an even larger crowd of 500,000 thronged the streets of the British capital, with thousands waving Palestinian flags and chanting slogans in support of the resistance – in defiance of government edicts.
Other big cities in Britain, including Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester and Glasgow, have been host to large demonstrations in support of the Palestinian resistance.
There is near-total disconnect between the political and media representatives of imperialism on the one hand and the masses of people on the other, with the masses no longer willing to buy the imperialist and zionist narrative.
Even a section of jewish youth is refusing to accept the narrative propagated by imperialist and zionist propaganda.
On 8 October, New York City’s chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America rallied in Times Square to celebrate Palestinian resistance.
A statement endorsed by 34 student groups at Harvard University blamed Israel for the violence inflicted on its people. At California State University Long Beach, one student group advertised a “protest for Palestine” with a poster featuring a paraglider of the sort that the resistance used to attack Israel – a motif that Black Lives Matter in Chicago also adopted.
Lawrence Summers, former Harvard president and US treasury secretary, was alarmed by these developments, saying he was “sickened” by the university’s failure to distance itself from the statement of its pro-Palestine student groups.
“Why can’t we find anything approaching the moral clarity of Harvard students after George Floyd’s death or Russia’s incursion of Ukraine when terrorists kill, rape and take hostage hundreds of Israelis attending a music festival?” Summers wrote in another post.
Frankly, it is Mr Summers who is in need of moral clarity so as to be able to distinguish between just and unjust struggles. It is he who needs the moral clarity and strength to condemn Israeli violence as well as neo-nazi Nato’s proxy war against Russia, instead of getting them upside down. As to the resistance raping Israeli women, he should back that assertion with evidence rather than spout baseless slander.
The USA’s Democratic party is evidently facing a generational rift over Israel that runs through its jewish constituency.
The allegedly ‘left’ AOC (Alexandra Ocasio Cortes) backed out of the Times Square rally and later condemned it. However, her colleagues – Ilhan Omer and Rashida Talib – did not mention Hamas, let alone condemn it. Instead, Talib – a Palestinian American, called for “dismantling the apartheid system that creates the suffocating, dehumanising conditions that can lead to resistance” and warned that the “cycle of violence” would continue unless military aid to Israel was cut. (Information in the preceding paragraphs from Left’s take on Hamas stuns America’s jews – and threatens Democratic party by Joshua Chaffin, Financial Times, 15 October 2023)
Meanwhile, panic and demoralisation are increasing in Israel. Tens of thousands of Israelis who lived close to the border fence with Gaza have fled the area, and even towns as large as Sderot, with a population of 30,000, have been evacuated. Bereft of civilians, they are now populated by hundreds of thousands of Israeli troops.
There have been reports of Israeli soldiers refusing to fight, disagreements between commanders and the withdrawal of senior officers.
As rats desert a sinking ship, one by one the two-faced quisling regimes in the region, fearful of their own people’s reaction, are distancing themselves from Israel.
Jordan cancelled a summit at which President Biden was due to meet Jordanian and Egyptian leaders, along with Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority. Turkey, Jordan and Saudi Arabia have all blamed Israel for the conflict.
In a show of force, and to intimidate the people of the middle east, the USA has dispatched two American aircraft carriers – Dwight D Eisenhower and Gerald R Ford to the eastern Mediterranean along with 3,000 troops.
The zionist leaders of Israel, along with their imperialist backers, instead of delving into the real cause of the struggle – the dispossession of the Palestinians and the occupation of their homeland by zionist settlers – consider it to be a ‘security’ issue, treating those who resist their occupation as ‘terrorists’.
Israel regularly resorts to massive and disproportionate force to root out what it calls “Hamas terrorism” – that is, to stamp out Palestinian resistance, in the process killing thousands of Palestinian people. Experience shows that, after a brief respite, the resistance always hits back, each time to be followed by Israeli destruction of Palestinian infrastructure and life on an industrial scale.
From each such operation, however, Israel emerges weaker than it was before its murderous operation – notwithstanding its sophisticated weapons and its fighter jets.
The zionists and their backers fail to understand that the laws of history are stronger than the laws of artillery. No matter how sophisticated the weaponry used by zionism, it can never defeat the just cause of the Palestinian people.
In the end, people are the decisive force, and all attempts by the zionists aimed at the wholesale obliteration of the Palestinian people will be no more successful than were the Hitlerite attempts to wipe the jewish people from the face of the earth.
The events of 7 October were just a harbinger of what the future has in store for zionism.
Having read Gideon Rachman’s articles in the Financial Times over a number of years and given up all hope of ever reading anything sensible coming from his pen, it was pleasantly surprising to read an article he had written on the events in Palestine following 7 October.
Normally, he has been an advocate of fighting to the last drop of blood of the last Ukrainian – or whichever other population is being slaughtered on the altar of Anglo-American imperialism. This time, though, he had this sane advice to offer to Israel:
“More than 20 years after starting its war on terror, America is probably less powerful and respected around the world than it was in 2001. And its own society has been gravely wounded,” he wrote, in a clear warning to Israel as to what awaits it when the present fighting is over.
Israel, he says, is in danger of repeating America’s “errors” – ie, defeating ‘terrorism’ (resistance would be the appropriate term, but that does not come easily to the political and ideological representatives of imperialism) through conventional military means.
“But,” he wrote, “islamism is an idea and terrorism is a tactic. So destroying one islamist terrorist organisation does not end the problem.”
He reminded those who have not completely shut their eyes and ears that 20 years after the entry of US troops to Kabul, the Taliban are the rulers in Afghanistan.
In a warning to Israelis, he pointed out that Hamas is a “social and political movement with deep roots”, and that a “war against a foreign occupier feeds the nationalism and fanaticism on which organisations like the Taliban and Hamas thrive. With Taliban installed in Afghanistan, who could rule out Hamas still running Gaza in 20 years’ time, improbable as that now seems?”
This is the closest that a bourgeois journalist can be expected to come to the truth. Translated into ordinary language, Mr Rachman’s words mean: Hamas is a resistance movement with deep social roots, which means it is not a terrorist movement. It is fighting for national liberation against a foreign occupier, which goes to explain its determined resistance (‘fanaticism’, if it pleases Mr Rachman). It thus cannot be ruled out that Hamas will still be ruling Gaza in 20 years’ time.
By treating the Palestinians purely as a ‘security’ issue, the Israelis are indeed ‘poised to repeat’ America’s ‘error’ – ie, imperialism’s failed predatory war for domination.
The only solution is a political settlement, failing which “another generation of Palestinians will emerge, committed to taking the fight to Israel”. In other words, using overwhelming force cannot guarantee Israeli security.
Just as civilian casualties, Guantánamo prison camp, and the torture by the CIA did lasting damage to the USA’s standing in the world, similar practices by Israel will do the same to her.
Then there is the damage to the society waging an aggressive, unjust war.
Close to 30,000 US troops, Rachman says, committed suicide after serving in Afghanistan and Iraq – three times more than those killed in the battlefield – implying that something similar awaits the Israelis waging unjust war against the Palestinians.
“A war on terror,” he concludes, “unifies a country in the short term, but can rip it apart over the longer period” – a lesson that “a traumatised Israel needs to think about – before it is too late.” (Israel and the lessons of 9/11, 24 October 2023)
The Israeli war on the Palestinian people, who are waging a just struggle for national liberation and self-determination stands to rip Israeli society apart instead of unifying it.
Israel supporters say that Israel wants peace. Really? But, says the Israeli journalist Gideon Levy, Israel does not want a just peace. Occupation, creeping annexation, inhumane blockades, destruction of olive groves, the arbitrary imprisonment of thousands, torture, daily humiliation of civilians and house demolitions – these are not policies compatible with a just peace.
And, as the price of speaking this truth, Gideon Levy now goes around with a bodyguard.
Although there have been large demonstrations in Britain in support of the Palestinian people, the organisers of these demonstrations have characteristically failed to put forward any meaningful demands. The message that must be given to the masses is that of non-cooperation with the zionist war crimes. British workers must to do everything possible to facilitate the victory of the Palestinian resistance,
The CPGB-ML, small though it is, is one of the very few organisations that is boldly trying to permeate the working class with these messages:
No cooperation with the criminal zionist war against the Palestinian people!
Victory to the resistance!
