En route to a broken hospital, five-month-old Zeinab weighed four pounds when she starved to death in her mother’s arms.With a blank check from the U.S. imperialist bosses, the nazi Israeli regime is executing genocide by famine against two million people in Gaza, from infants to elders. 

The international crisis of capitalism has spawned an unhinged Israel. The hyper-nationalist “Jewish state” answers to no one but its gutter racist leadership and its majority base for ethnic cleansing and mass murder. 

The biggest imperialist gangsters—the United States, China, Russia—extract resources and exploit smaller capitalist countries, inevitably sparking competition and then armed conflict to redivide the world. The Middle East is one spark away from being set ablaze in a full-blown regional war that could lead to World War Three. 

For the international working class and Progressive Labor Party, our charge remains the same: to reject all nationalism and turn imperialist wars into class war for communist revolution. 

Gaza, a concentration camp

Gaza is literally a concentration camp. Famine lies at the heart of Israel’s calculated genocide strategy, about to enter its third year.
The official death count has surpassed 62,000, though the reality may be closer to 200,000 (The Intercept, 7/25). With 90 percent of Gaza reduced to rubble, morgue and hospital tallies can’t be reliable. 

This spring, for 80 days straight, Israel barred all aid from entering Gaza. Thousands of trucks of food and medicine lie rotting at the borders of Jordan and Egypt. After Israel shut down more than 400 distribution points, what little aid that makes it into Israel is confined to four sites all in corridors lined by Israeli tanks and buzzed by Israeli drones. The operations are run by the cynically named Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a

U.S.-Israeli organization (UN, 7/24) that hired trigger-happy guards with license to shoot to kill. 
Predictably, these “distribution centers”  became death traps. Since May 27, Israeli troops and U.S. mercenaries have massacred more than a thousand starving people desperately trying to get a small box of food to feed their children. 

Gaza is a mass grave in the making. 

U.S. rulers’ dilemma: pariah ally, internal crisis 

Expansionist Israel has served as a watchdog for U.S. imperialism  since the apartheid nation’s founding in 1948. Its role was to act as a counterweight to Russian imperialism—and, after the ayatollahs’ 1979 takeover, to Iran—in the oil-rich Middle East. 

As the U.S. struggles to hold their alliances together, their grip is slipping. France is about to become the first G7 country to recognize Palestine as a state, and Britain and Canada are planning to do the same. Even longtime U.S. allies are reaching their limit with Israel—not because they care about famine, but because it’s hurting their capitalist interests in the region. Meanwhile, China and Russia (along with 145 other UN members) already back a Palestinian state and are using the genocide to undercut the U.S. as they await their chance to redraw the map. 

It’s reached the point where the top think tank for U.S. finance capital, the liberal main wing faction of the U.S. ruling-class, has reassessed their lock-step support for Israel. The Council on Foreign Relations is now pushing for an end to the genocide and possible recognition of Palestine as “Trump’s best path to forging a new nuclear agreement with Iran [and] consolidating U.S. partnerships in the Gulf” (Foreign Affairs, 7/15). “In the years to come, the alliances it took decades to foster will begin to wither, and U.S. rivals [China, Russia] will waste no time in leaping to exploit the resulting vacuum” (Foreign Affairs, 6/24). In reality, that process is already well underway.

The wave of international revulsion at the starvation genocide has also exposed the division within the U.S. ruling class, and the pressure on the main wing’s Democratic Party to rethink its embrace of apartheid pariah Israel. After Zohran Mamdani ran on a moderate anti-Zionist platform and won the Democratic mayoral primary in New York, the national Democratic leadership has yet to endorse him. 

Let’s be clear: No imperialists—and none of their politician stooges—will put an end to nationalist genocides. You need a communist revolution for that. 

Choke the bosses to death

Amid the unspeakable horror, signs of fightback are breaking through. Workers in Egypt are hurling bottles of food into the Gulf of Aqaba in the hope of reaching families at death’s door in Gaza. Among U.S. workers, especially young workers, support for Israel stands at a 25-year low and Palestine at an all-time high. Last year’s mass campus actions against genocide led to suspensions, expulsions, and firings. Still, students and workers are fighting back. From Seattle to France, Britain, and the Netherlands, thousands are joining sit-ins and other protests against the Zionazis. Even in Israel itself, a group of teenagers risked jail by burning their draft notices in downtown Tel Aviv (The Independent, 7/25).

While this activity points to the potential power of the working class, we need to make clear that all forms of nationalism serve to divide and exploit workers. All nationalist leaders will betray us. Israel is an especially egregious example of how nationalism leads to racism and ultimately to ethnic cleansing, genocide, and war, but it’s far from the only one (see bottom). 

For baby Zeinab and working-class children everywhere, fight back! To end the spirals of imperialist slaughter, we must reject all bosses’ flags and build international solidarity. We need workers everywhere: in factories, hospitals, communities, the military, colleges, transit, and more. We must build a mass red army that’s committed to smashing capitalism and its borders. If you haven’t committed to Progressive Labor Party, now is the time!

Famine is the bosses’ weapon

Gaza is part of a long, disgraceful history of the bosses’ using famine as a weapon to terrorize, divide, and kill.  

Historically:

The British Raj: Over a 40-year span, colonial policies and grain exports caused the death of one hundred million workers on the Indian subcontinent. The 1943 Bengal famine alone claimed the lives of nearly four million. 

Nazi Germany: During World War Two, Hitler’s Der Hungerplan engineered a famine in the Nazi-occupied territories of the Soviet Union. Seven million Soviet civilians were killed. Forced starvation was also a primary instrument of genocide in the Holocaust. Everyone starved in the concentration camps, but Jewish families starved the most; food was allocated based on ethnic groupings. In Auschwitz, the biggest killing field in human history, starvation murdered hundreds of thousands. 

Today:

Sudan: Four-plus decades of British colonial racist policies and U.S.-sponsored civil war is devastating the lives of the working class in Sudan. Today, eight million Sudanese workers face famine due to internal displacement and a war economy fueled by interimperialist rivalry between Russia, the U.S., and its junior partner the UAE. 

Somalia: Perpetual famine is the end result of 120 years of British and Italian colonialism, U.S.-backed proxy wars, sanctions, and budget cuts forced by the International Monetary Fund. Due to U.S. aid cuts and soaring food prices, nearly five million people now face starvation.

Haiti: Centuries of French colonial exploitation, U.S. invasions, and puppet regimes have wrecked access to food for workers and their families. More than five million suffer from chronic hunger because of small capitalist gang violence, displacement, and U.S.-backed chaos.