Seventy-six years after the Nakba, the catastrophic displacement of 700,000 Palestinians from their homes, the butchering Israeli bosses marked the occasion with an invasion of Rafah, Gaza’s southernmost city. They forced masses of brutalized civilians to flee yet again to mythical “safe zones” with no water or sanitation. After 200 days of the Zionist regime’s genocide in Gaza and an unchecked rampage by settler death squads in the West Bank, more than 35,000 Palestinians, mainly women and children, have been slaughtered. With Gaza’s hospitals in a state of collapse and food, fuel, and medicine shut off at closed border crossings, the true toll is likely much higher ( Reuters, 5/14). No one knows how many helpless civilians are buried under the rubble from Israel’s one-ton bombs, courtesy of Genocide Joe Biden and his fellow mass murderers in Washington.
Despite blatant lies by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu about Israel’s “limited operation” in Rafah, an area the size of Newark is an unfolding humanitarian disaster. Workers and children are at risk of death from starvation, thirst, and disease. Over 900,000 people–of a total Gaza population of 2.2 million–have been forced out of Rafah since Israel’s assault began (Al Jazeera, 5/20).
Despite warnings from rulers from Africa to China, and a ceasefire deal signed off on by Hamas, Israel’s bosses are moving toward their savage final solution. Days before the Rafah invasion, Biden put a hold on a bomb shipment and warned Netanyahu that a full-scale attack would cross a “red line.” But just one week later, Biden’s flunkies announced a new $1 billion arms sale to Israel (CNN, 5/14). To preserve their shaky foothold in the Middle East, the U.S. rulers have no choice but to bankroll their junior partner in atrocities.
Now, more than ever, the international working class needs the revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party (PLP). As the rulers plot their next bloodbath in their run-up to World War Three, we must build the only movement that can defeat imperialism and fascism, as it did in World War Two: communism, a dictatorship of the working class. Join PLP! Together we can build a red army to turn the guns around and smash this genocidal profit system for all time.
U.S. rulers' weakness & desperation
For the U.S. rulers, Israel and its fast-rising fascism present an irresolvable contradiction. They need Israel to project U.S. military power in the Middle East, home to the world’s largest reserves of oil and gas. Abandoning Netanyahu and his Jewish supremacist regime would open the regional door to the imperialist rivals in China, Russia, and Iran. China is already seeking to pivot to the Middle East to exploit U.S. disarray (Guardian, 5/7).
At the same time, the U.S. can’t afford to tie itself too tightly to a racist pariah state. Netanyahu has been charged by the International Criminal Court with “war crimes and crimes against humanity, including the starvation of civilians as a weapon of war and ‘intentionally directing attacks against a civilian population’’’ (New York Times, 5/20). Biden discouraged the Rafah invasion because it reinforces the widening perception of U.S. complicity in genocide. And if China senses that a floundering U.S. empire is spread too thin by its various failing proxy wars, including the looming debacle in Ukraine, it might accelerate its plan to invade Taiwan.
Biden’s Vietnam moment?
As Biden gears up for this fall’s presidential election, his finance capital backers know they’re at risk of losing the White House to the isolationist bosses behind Donald Trump. Biden is polling weakly among young and Black and Latin voters who deplore his role in the Gaza genocide. The liberal rulers are panicked at the prospect of mass actions at this summer’s Democratic National Convention in Chicago, a potential replay of the anti-Vietnam War protests in 1968 that helped sink Democrat Hubert Humphrey (Centerforpolitics.org, 5/12)
For anti-racist workers, there is no “lesser evil” choice between liberal racist Biden and gutter racist Trump. They both support apartheid and genocide in Israel. They both stand for the vicious oppression of the international working class. Our only choice is to smash all racist politicians and the billionaire bosses behind them– to fight for communism, a society run by and for workers.
Jewish state a formula for racism and genocide
Netanyahu is in a tight spot. Despite pervasive anti-Palestinian racism within Israel, he is widely unpopular for his failure to rescue all the Israeli hostages. Many fear that an all-out ground war would put the hostages at even greater risk. But beyond Netanyahu's need to appease the bloodthirsty religious right in his governing kkkoalition, the fundamental problem is Jewish nationalism–Zionism. Most workers in Israel have been misled to believe that their security relies on a “Jewish and democratic state,” as defined by the country’s “Basic Laws.” Many are loyal to Netanyahu’s Likud Party, which is committed to a “Greater Israel'' that stretches “from the river to the sea” (thenation.com, 11/22/23). The liberals “two-state solution'' has been dead and buried for a long time.
But Israel can’t annex the occupied West Bank (much less Gaza) and keep a Jewish majority without wholesale ethnic cleansing. In the West Bank,where illegal Jewish settlers are killing Palestinians with impunity, known Zionist terrorists in the Israeli government are running the show (New York Times, 5/16). An uninhabitable Gaza has been bombarded into “one big displacement camp” for descendants of those expelled by the 1948 Nakba, when Israel was born (npr.org, 5/15). As National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, one of the more outspoken Nazis in Netanyahu’s cabinet, proclaimed at an Independence Day march, “We must return to Gaza now! We are coming home to the Holy Land! We must encourage…the voluntary emigration of the residents of Gaza” (haaretz.com, 5/14).
But if Zionism is the problem, Palestinian nationalism–and the small-time nationalist gangsters who lead Hamas and Fatah–cannot be the solution. For workers in Palestine/Israel, the one way out of the capitalist nightmare is to reject all nations and to unite to destroy all bosses and their poisonous capitalist system. The only solution is multiracial unity and communist revolution.
From campuses to worksites to the street, fight back!
Mass protests against the carnage in Gaza are disrupting the bosses’ business as usual. Students and workers around the world are leading bold, inspiring actions, from encampments and graduation walkouts to sit-ins to block arms shipments. PLP applauds the courage, determination, and working-class solidarity of this fightback.
As most college students break for the summer, it’s time to expand the fight beyond the campuses. We must take it to our neighborhoods, to our workplaces, and to key points of production. PLP calls on all students, workers, and soldiers to unite to keep this movement going and, most important, to join our Party. If we’re going to smash this whole damn genocidal system, we’re going to need to build a mass revolutionary communist organization. Every new comrade is another nail in the coffin of capitalism. We have a world to win!
