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 percent were women and children. No distinction is made between civilians and combatants, with every civilian, presumably children as well, being targeted. 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 described the entire Gaza Strip as a mass assassination factory.
The number of Palestinians murdered so far accounts for a massive one percent of its prewar population of 2.3 million people. 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 percent 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 the barest existence, let alone of any semblance of a civilised life. Residents of northern Gaza were told by Israel to move to the ‘safety’ of the south, while the Israeli 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, United Nations buildings, housing complexes and cultural centres have all 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 killed, and the greatest number of journalists assassinated – all of whom have been deliberately targeted by the rabid zionist war machine.
The bombing campaign has been accompanied by a propaganda blitzkrieg that describes 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 percent of these bombs have been 2,000lb and 1,000lb dumb bombs – that is, without any precision system, causing destruction beyond imagination. Sixty-eight percent of the buildings in northern Gaza have been flattened, and their surviving residents thrown out to eke out an existence wherever they can find a 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. While the pretext for this intensive bombardment is ‘the elimination of Hamas’, the truth is that this genocidal campaign, involving the commission of war crimes on an industrial scale, is aimed at eliminating the entire Palestinian population through death, destruction and expulsion.
But the zionists will no more achieve this aim than did the Nazis in their campaign to eliminate the jewish people from the face of the earth.
While the world’s attention is focused on the zionist blitzkrieg in Gaza, Israel’s armed forces and settlers are busy terrorising and murdering the Palestinians who live in the Bantustans of the West Bank.
Daily raids on Palestinian towns and villages are taking place at an escalating rate, with soldiers and settlers routinely breaking 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 the theatre’s equipment and stealing its computers. Quite rightly, 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 the cultural symbols and heritage of Palestine – even waving a Palestinian flag has been criminalised!
Labelling Hamas as 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 the anticolonial struggle of the 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 USA not condemn the liberation fighters in Korea, Vietnam and Afghanistan, among a host of others, 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 be scarcely 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 being allowed in by the occupation forces. The purpose of this criminal and barbaric collective punishment is 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 European 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. But in the end, the zionists will be no more successful in their attempt at imposing a ‘final solution’ on 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, but it came into being late in the day, when colonialism was already breathing its last. It will go the same way as every other colonial state.
Israeli attempts at genocide and ethnic cleansing are serving only to hasten the arrival of that day.
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 across the world, including in the centres of imperialism, where many are outraged at the obvious complicity of their governments in Israel’s war crimes.
Hundreds of thousands of people have attended these protests – in London, Paris, Berlin and many other cities across Europe, as well as in the United States, the biggest and most important backer of Israel.
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, and for whom this is an existential struggle.
Not surprisingly, then, since the eruption of the latest fighting, over half a million Israelis with dual citizenship have fled the country. Israeli soldiers are frightened of their own shadows and in panic shoot randomly in all directions.
On 15 December in Shejaiya, IDF soldiers killed three Israelis who had somehow managed to escape from detention in Gaza, allegedly ‘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.
Following this act of cowardice, the Israeli military issued a statement expressing its “deep remorse over the tragic incident and sends its heartfelt condolences”.
In fact, the incident revealed the shoot to kill policy of the Israeli army. Anything that moves is clearly fair game, according to their own ‘rules of engagement’, in which soldiers shoot first and ask questions later.
The Israeli prime minister Netanyahu called the killing of the three Israeli men “an unbearable tragedy”, exposing the deep inhumanity and supremacy at the heart of zionism. For while the killing of three jewish persons is characterised as “an unbearable tragedy”, for which deep remorse must be expressed, the killing of 22,000 Palestinians evokes no such remorse and is not treated as tragedy.
Blinded by their dead-end racist ideology, the Israeli ruling class regards jews as the chosen people while reserving utter contempt for Palestinians. Moreover, while oppressing Palestinians in the most brutal way, it cultivates the aura of victimhood based on WW2 mythology – even though nowhere in the world are jews an oppressed people today!
For the zionists, there is only one holocaust – namely the murder of six million jews by Nazi Germany. The dozens of other colonial and imperialist 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 their own holocaust of Palestinians.
The zionist ideology effectively blinds its followers to the suffering of other people, reserving its humanity for one group of people only. Thus 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.”
It is not Israeli resilience that keeps the murder machine going, however; it is the backing the zionists are receiving from imperialist countries – especially from the USA.
The USA is not merely green-lighting the Israeli genocide in Gaza; it is actually facilitating it with military, economic and diplomatic support. Planeloads of military materiel – bombs and shells in particular – are being delivered every day by the USA to the Israeli armed forces. As Max Blumenthal of Grayzone has pointed out, the USA could stop the slaughter in Gaza within one hour if it wanted to do so.
All the administration of President Joe Biden has to do is to make a telephone call to the Israeli prime minister to the effect that there will be no more spare parts for F16 fighter planes, no more F35s, and no more military, economic or diplomatic support for Israel’s genocide.
Instead, the US government says to the Israelis: “Please be careful.” Bypassing Congress, the US government has sent millions of dollars’ worth of military equipment to the zionist murder machine on the pretext of ‘responding to an acute emergency that threatens the interests of US national security’.
Moreover, the USA has used its veto in the UN security council to thwart a resolution calling for a ceasefire. A similar resolution was brought to the general assembly, where it passed with 153 countries voting in favour. While there were just over two dozen abstentions, only the USA, Israel and half a dozen countries in thrall to the USA voted against.
While general assembly resolutions are non-binding, this vote revealed the total isolation of the USA in the court of world opinion. It also made very clear to the world that the Israeli genocide could not continue even for a day without the active support of the USA.
Even in the midst of the carnage in Gaza, top US officials such as national security advisor Jake Sullivan and secretary of state Antony Blinken keep repeating the sickening formula that “Israel has a right, indeed a duty, to defend itself against Hamas”, stressing the USA’s continuing commitment to supporting the country, no matter what.
As a matter of fact, however, as an occupying power, Israel has no right to defend itself against the people whom it is occupying. On the other hand, being occupied and oppressed, the Palestinians have every right to resist by any means – including by 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 in which Palestinians are denied even a modicum of rights, and where institutionalised discrimination is practiced against them through controls on their every movement and activity.
Even such western NGOs as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have documented in their reports the state of apartheid in Palestine. But none of this inconvenient information 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 either ignored or ostracised as an antisemite. But this overused weapon is increasingly being seen for what it is: namely, a means of silencing opposition to zionism.
More and more people all over the world, including in Europe and the USA at last, have come to see through this hypocritical cant and to show support in very large numbers for the national-liberation struggle of the Palestinian people. Moreover, an increasing number of jewish people in the USA 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, where governments are busy attempting to suppress all dissent by any means available. A recent Harvard-Harris poll found that, among the younger generation of Americans aged 18-24, there was wide support for Palestine; 51 percent of whom believed that Hamas was justified in its assault of 7 October against Israel.
In Britain, the government is trying every trick to suppress opposition to the government’s pro-zionist stance. 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 antisemitic ideology.
If the idea behind this persecution was to suppress our pamphlet, the police and their masters in the Home Office have ended up lifting a rock only to drop it on their own feet. Following the publicity around our comrades’ arrests, sales have increased exponentially.
It is a sign of the authorities’ weakness, not strength, that the sale of a pamphlet telling the truth about this history of zionism should make them resort to arrests. Nevertheless, the suppression of free speech is a sign of the sharpening of class struggle in Britain, and the class-conscious proletariat should accept the challenge and rise to the occasion.
Even before the genocide in Gaza has subsided, the imperialists are hatching plots against the rising Palestinian revolution, saying that the stooges of 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 for three decades to prevent from emerging in practice.
As to who should run Gaza, or for that matter the West Bank, this can only be decided by the Palestinian people themselves. The Palestinian Authority, thoroughly discredited for collaborating with the occupation, will certainly not be acceptable to the people.
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 remains 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!
