Workers and students in New York City have risen up in anger at the fascist collective punishment that the Israeli government is raining down on the workers of Gaza.
Every day, hundreds to thousands have gathered – and Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members have been there in the struggle, pointing out that neither the Big Fascist government of Israel nor Hamas, the Small Fascists they helped install in Gaza, can lead workers to liberation. Most importantly, PLP called for a communist revolution that rids the world of all bosses and their lethal capitalist system.
In the Bronx, around 100 protesters gathered in front of the offices of Richie Torres, a representative to the U.S. Congress. This racist Democratic Party liberal weaponizes his Gay and Latin identity to try to convince his constituents, who live in the poorest Congressional district in the country, to unconditionally support the fascist, genocidal Israeli government. Our line stood out against the backdrop of Palestinian nationalism, as Hamas’ brutal attack has revealed their true nature as capitalists willing to kill workers for control of “their” workers. In fact, a recent survey showed that even Gazans see through Hamas’ lies; 44 percent of those surveyed in the territory said they had no trust in the Hamas government (Foreign Affairs, 10/25). Many of the demonstrators eagerly took our literature, which attacked both groups of bosses. PLP members had conversations with workers, struggling with them to understand that there cannot be a “Free Palestine” without destroying capitalism.
On Friday, October 27, a thousand people gathered in and around Grand Central Terminal, shutting down one of the busiest train stations in the country. After hundreds sat down inside the station, hundreds more took over 42nd Street outside and began marching west. As in the Bronx, the chants were mostly for an immediate ceasefire and for a “free Palestine.” While chanting “Arab, Jewish, Black, and white. Workers of the world unite!” we distributed more than 300 copies of CHALLENGE and 300 leaflets. One demonstrator, after carefully reading our leaflet, called it a “breath of fresh air” because it criticized Hamas while attacking the barbarity of 75 years of Israel’s colonial apartheid state and the ongoing Nazi-like collective punishment of Gaza.
Workers all over the world are demonstrating the powerful sense of solidarity that we have as members of the working class. This display is truly inspiring, lighting the way to a world where the international working class will be all there is, a future where every boss, whether Israeli or Palestinian, U.S. or Russian, will be nothing but a relic of the past. We are struggling in demonstrations, teach-ins and in one-on-one conversations with our friends, students, and coworkers to build communist ideas and our Party – to make this future a reality.
How do you spell fascists? IDF
How do you spell murderers? IDF
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Hey, hey, ho, ho!
The occupation has got to go!
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Joe Biden, you can’t hide!
We charge you with genocide
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They are killing kids overseas...
Shut it down!
They’re killing kids in our streets...
Shut it down!
They’re getting killed by bombs...
Shut it down!
They’re getting killed by police...
Shut it down!
If they keep bombing...
Shut it down!
This racist system
Shut it down!
This genocidal system
Shut it down!
This capitalist system
Shut it down!
Shut this racist system down!
Shut this racist system down!
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U.S., Israel hand in hand
racist murder is the bosses’ plan,
From Palestine to Mexico
The bosses borders, got to go!
U.S. bombs dropped by Israeli jets rain down on children
France24, 10/15–Israel's strikes on the Gaza Strip have led to an "unprecedented human catastrophe" in the Palestinian territory, the United Nations agency supporting Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) said Sunday. "Not one drop of water, not one grain of wheat, not a litre of fuel has been allowed in the Gaza Strip for the last eight days," Philippe Lazzarini, commissioner general of UNRWA, told journalists. More than 1,000 people are missing under the rubble of buildings that were destroyed by Israeli air strikes in Gaza, the Palestinian civil defence team said on Sunday. Israeli strikes on the Gaza Strip have killed at least 2,450 people since Hamas's bloody attack on southern Israel last week, the Gaza health ministry said Sunday.
Palestinian medical workers experience raw lessons of capitalism
Al Jazeera, 10/14–Dr Nisreen al-Shorafa has gotten barely 10 hours of sleep over the past seven days. The 30-year-old surgeon runs the emergency room at Al Awda Hospital in Tal al-Zaatar, between Beit Lahia and Beit Hanoun, and she cannot recall a time when she has worked harder. Dedicated completely to helping save the people who survived the relentless Israeli bombing, she has pushed herself beyond what she thought she could do. On Saturday, the hospital started receiving warning calls from the Israeli military. The message was stark and ominous: The hospital had to be evacuated because it would be bombed. “I’ll bet they [Israeli army] are proud of themselves, threatening to bomb the hospital,” said resident nurse Asala al-Batsh. “They insisted that everyone and everything move. All hospital personnel, all the patients, including those in the ICU, and the bodies in the morgue.” After trying to explain to the Israeli army on the phone the inhumanity and impossibility of moving everyone out of the hospital and southward, the team gave up. “We decided not to leave,” al-Shorafa said…The Palestinian Ministry of Health has urged the international community to intervene several times, but no response or assistance has come.
Capitalism climate crisis worsens
The Guardian, 10/5–At least 43 million child displacements were linked to extreme weather events over the past six years, the equivalent of 20,000 children being forced to abandon their homes and school every single day, new research has found. Floods and storms accounted for 95% of recorded child displacement between 2016 and 2021, according to the first-of-its-kind analysis by Unicef…The rest – more than 2 million children – were displaced by wildfires and drought. In absolute terms, China, the Philippines and India dominate with 22.3 million child displacements – just over half the total number – which the report attributes to the countries’ geographical exposure to extreme weather such as monsoon rains and cyclones and large child populations, as well as increased pre-emptive evacuations. In August 2022, unprecedented floods submerged a third of Pakistan underwater, causing billions of dollars in damage and displacing around 3.6 million children – many of whom went months without access to proper shelter, safe drinking water and sanitation.
Liberals remind us that they attack immigrants, too
Gothamist, 10/1– A top advisor to Mayor Eric Adams on Sunday called for the federal government to “close the borders” in order to prevent more migrants from coming to New York City. “We need the federal government, the Congress members, the Senate and the president to do its job: close the borders,” Adams’ senior advisor Ingrid Lewis-Martin said during an interview on PIX11. “And until you close the borders, you need to come up with a full-on decompression strategy where you can take all of our migrants and move them throughout all of our 50 states.” Lewis-Martin’s comments marked an escalation in the rhetoric from the mayor’s office surrounding the city's migrant crisis…Lewis-Martin said more than 61,000 migrants remain under the city’s care. The call to “close the borders” resembled comments made by several right-wing members of Congress who threatened to shut down the federal government if strict border policies were not included in a new funding bill.
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Racist U.S.-Israel, you can’t hide: Kill the bosses’ genocidal system
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- 19 October 2023 435 hits
New York, NY, October 13—Thousands of workers and students gathered near Times Square and thousands more protested elsewhere in New York City to demand the end of Israeli bosses’ fascist occupation and genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. The righteous rage of the working class was potent as hundreds tore away from the sidewalk and took to the streets near Grand Central in an illegal march. Many workers took leadership by passionately leading chants with energy.
Multiracial and multigenerational protesters chanted “El pueblo unido jamás será vencido! (The people united will never be defeated), and Arabic chants. Several members of Progressive Labor Party (PLP) were in the crowd and we passed out at least a hundred copies of CHALLENGE. We also passed out flyers titled “War in Israel/Gaza means: Fight for the international working class, Join PLP.” One friend of the Party started up a sharper chant, “Biden you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide!”
PLP Fights to end all nationalism, Workers of the World Unite!
Nationalism is a deadly ideology that has unfortunately afflicted students, soldiers, our coworkers, and our friends’ understanding of the war. The most deadly side of the nationalist coin at the moment is Zionism. One Jewish education worker responded to an article about Palestinian civilian deaths by commenting that “Hamas started this, they’re a terrible group, terrorists.”
This misconstruction echoes the line of the U.S. ruling class and of Israeli bosses. It is imperialist rivalry and the United States’ funding of Israel’s fascist regime that is driving this war. While Hamas’ hands are certainly drenched in blood, their murders of workers do not add up to the genocidal nature of the U.S. imperialists or the Israeli bosses who kill far more with their bombings.
As fiercely as we must smash the Israeli bosses for their murderous 75-year reign of terror, genocidal occupation, and bombing of Gaza, we cannot replace the calls with another form of nationalism; we cannot support the Palestinian bosses by cheering on Hamas. Many Hamas leaders live in fancy apartments and hotel suites, funded by bosses in Iran and Syria, among other sources (algemeiner, 7/28/14).
Meanwhile, the average worker in Gaza lives in squalor, with little to no access to food, water or sanitation. This form of all-class unity, that is, believing that Hamas will make a Palestine for the best interests of Palestinian workers, is a dead-end. The nationalism put on full display in these protests will not free workers in Palestine or around the world.
Protest organizers asked attendees to bring Palestinian flags, which coated the march, as protesters chanted “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” and “Free, Free, Free Palestine.”
In perhaps the most obvious display of this irony, one worker led those chants while waving an American flag.
“I don’t see how anyone could take the Israeli side or support Hamas for that matter,” commented the spouse of a teacher we spoke with. Indeed, many workers have a difficulty understanding how the nationalism they don’t subscribe to could lead anyone to think killing working-class children from another “nation” is okay. PLP responds that internationalism and communism are the only answers to the scourge of nationalism in our class.
College students and workers speak out
This week, as the death toll climbed in Palestine/Israel, a group called Students for Justice in Palestine at New York University (NYU) organized a teach-in. On October 12th, they had student speakers and a professor discuss media manipulation of the ongoing genocide of Palestinians by the state of Israel. A student filmmaker played a short film she made depicting her family’s story in Palestine, starting with her grandpa, whose land was taken from him during Nakba, until recently, when her family has been displaced and their homes taken away. The stories and experiences of the Palestinian students were incredibly moving and heartbreaking. There was also a clear message at the end of the teach-in, displaying the shared struggles that the international working class faces today and why it is even more important to unite.
That same day, Columbia University Students for Justice in Palestine hosted a rally on campus. In fear of workers’ anger, security locked the school gates to shut out support from the community and pro-Israeli counter protestors. Students have been demanding an end to Columbia’s investment of endowments in “Israeli companies that…profit off of the construction of illegal settlements on Palestinian land.”
Across the city pro-Israeli forces have been small and marginal in the streets. Of course, with the U.S. and Israeli states on their side, only the most brazen of these fascists show their faces at protests. Still, that didn’t stop one racist from yelling at Palestine supporters, “You are sick people, animals, you don’t deserve to be here.” Meanwhile, Jewish Voices for Peace NYC held a large protest on Friday reminding the working class that many Jewish workers and students are committed to ending genocide in Palestine even as they grieve the loss of their loved ones.
As countless more die in Palestine/Israel and racists pop up in the streets of New York, PLP students, workers, and friends will be out in force. We will wave the red flag of internationalism and communism, and share our ideas, as we struggle with our class siblings to fight back and fight together.
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Editorial: Gaza genocide - No nations only communist liberation
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- 19 October 2023 439 hits
Utter chaos, destruction and brutality have followed the October 7 Hamas incursion into Israel that murdered 1,300 and wounded 3,000. The relentless response by the unity government of Israel, led by the butchers Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his liberal counterpart Benny Gantz (Reuters 10/12) has to date has murdered over 4,000 people including more than 1,000 children, wounded over 10,000, and leveled hospitals, schools, and homes in Gaza (UN 10/17). The war reflects and foreshadows the collapse of U.S. imperialism and the callous deathtrap that imperialist rivalry and nationalism hold for the workers of the world. This capitalist genocide will grow to even greater proportions in the coming days, as the bodies of hundreds murdered at al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza City are counted and the bombings continue and likely ground invasion begins.
Capitalist Genocide
The deaths of workers in Gaza are not collateral damage. They are the inevitable result of indiscriminate bombing of workers trapped in a densely packed city carried out by the Israeli military (Al Jazeera 10/18). The criminal war minister of defense of Israel Yoav Gallant, ordered the complete siege of Gaza, referring to workers there as “human animals” and promising, “There will be no light, no food, no fuel, everything is closed,” (Times of Israel 10/9/2023).
The fascist cliques that rule Gaza and Israel are state terrorist murderers sacrificing the lives of workers to carve out their positions and profits in a volatile and shifting world order. Workers and soldiers on both sides —and everywhere—must break down nationalist, religious and ethnic divisions, to fight together to crush a capitalist system that so completely fails the workers of the world.
This war in Gaza also creates greater instability and the risk of an escalation that, together with other conflicts like the one in Ukraine, paves the way for the outbreak of a Third World War. Capitalism only offers war and death to workers. The working class must destroy it with communist revolution.
From top dog to dogfight
This current war between Israel and Hamas is the continuation of the fight for dominance of the Middle East and its oil as the hegemony of the U.S. empire continues to decline.
The same U.S. ruling class who refused to bomb transport lines to Nazi concentration camps and turned away Jewish survivors of the Nazis, supported the creation of a “Jewish state” and the displacement of millions of workers from Palestine in exchange for a Cold War ally against Soviet influence in the Middle East and support in the fight to control the production and flow of the region’s oil. This nationalist bribe, sold to workers as a solution to centuries of anti-Jewish racism is leading to the mass slaughter of workers in Gaza and now Israel.
Nationalism and alliances with bosses anywhere are deadly for workers
Over the decades, the bosses in Israel in exchange for vast sums of money and weapons from the U.S., have provided crucial support for U.S. interests. The Israeli bosses helped secure the Suez Canal in the 70’s. They funneled weapons to the Nicaraguan Contras in the 80’s (NY Times 7/21/83) and provide crucial geopolitical and intelligence support to the U.S. bosses’ control of Mideast oil. Meanwhile, the U.S. bosses support the Israeli bosses’ apartheid laws and help to negotiate “peace” treaties with neighboring countries that continually condemned workers in the West Bank to live under a contiguous state of attack from Israeli nationalists and the IDF, and workers in Gaza to live in what is largely recognized as an open-air prison.
But, recently, the U.S-Israeli partnership and dominance have begun to unravel. Netanyahu refused to support sanctions against Russia after Russia invaded Ukraine. Earlier this year, China brokered a restoring of relations between Saudi-Arabia and Iran that undercut decades of the U.S. bosses strategy of playing them against each other (CNBC 3/15).
United States weakness
This week the U.S. has mobilized two aircraft carriers to the area, anticipating a further escalation of the conflict and hoping to discourage its global imperialist rivals such as China and Russia as well as local nationalists such as Iran from providing support to Hamas.
Even as the world is witnessing genocide in Gaza, Biden can only react by giving his unconditional support to the butcher Netanyahu, who half of the population in Israel rejects but who, by murdering workers in Gaza, will try to gain support in a divided Israeli society.
The decline of U.S. imperialism around the globe is creating an increasingly volatile situation. The U.S. is being challenged by rivals big and small. The increasingly desperate U.S. bosses will not go down without a fight. Their growing desperation is adding fuel to the fires.
Israel created Hamas
Hamas has controlled Gaza since 2007. It was founded as a nationalist organization in 1988 at the onset of the first uprising against the Israeli occupation. But its roots date to the late 1960’s and 70’s when the Israeli bosses were grasping for an alternative to Yassir Arafat’s Fatah organization. When an adherent of the Muslim Brotherhood, Sheik Ahmed Yassin formed the Islamist group Mujama al-Islamiya in 1979 Israel recognized it as an official organization. According to Ishaan Tharoor, “Yassin's Mujama would become Hamas, which, it can be argued, was Israel's Taliban: an Islamist group whose antecedents had been laid down by the West in a battle against a [Russian backed] enemy” (Washington Post 7/30/2014). Israel encouraged the rivalry between Fatah and Hamas even looking the other way as Hamas amassed weapons.
Hamas does not represent the resistance of workers in Gaza against the oppression of the Israeli state any more than Fatah did. Hamas, with the tacit support of the Israeli government, has always been primarily interested in seizing control of Gaza from Fatah and securing its own control of the territory (WSJ 1/24/2009).
For years Hamas has been reaping hundreds of millions of dollars in taxes on food (The Guardian 2010) and clothes (The New Arab 7/20/22) from the starving workers of Gaza to fill the pockets of its leadership and maintain it’s network of supporters.
While the working class on both sides of the Gaza war are trapped in the ambition of the nationalist group Hamas and Israel's murderous ruling class, for workers around the world there is no good choice under this deadly system.
The only way out is communist revolution
For the workers there is only one way out, to demolish capitalism and its rhetoric of nations, religions, races and borders, and build the communist state to guarantee us health and housing, together as a single international working class.
Capitalism creates religious and racial differences to undermine the revolutionary potential of global working-class unity. Thousands of workers inside and outside these countries will be dragged to support one of the fascist nationalist sides led by Israel or Hamas, both oppressors and enemies of the working class. Both must be swept away through a communist revolution.
From the ruins of Gaza and all the places devastated by capitalist war, the revolutionary consciousness of the international working class must be reborn. Let the imperialists start their wars, the workers will finish them with communist revolution.
