IDF continues destruction of Palestinian homes

France24, 6/1–Mohammed Al-Najjar, a 33-year-old Gazan, said Saturday he was "shocked" and feeling "lost" as he returned home, only to find much of Jabalia refugee camp in ruins after an Israeli offensive. "All the houses have been reduced to rubble," Najjar told AFP in Jabalia, in the northern Gaza Strip. "You are lost, you do not know where exactly your house is in the middle of this massive destruction."
Israeli forces carried out a massive bombardment campaign in Jabalia in recent weeks, part of a fierce ground offensive in northern Gaza -- an area the military had previously said was out of the control of Hamas militants. "I was shocked by the extent of the destruction in the latest aggression on Jabalia camp," said Najjar. At least 36,379 Palestinians have been killed and 82,407 wounded in Israel’s war in Gaza, according to the territory's Hamas-run health ministry. 

Battle for Myanmar picks up steam

Foreign Affairs, 5/31–The conflict in Myanmar, now in its fourth year, has claimed thousands of civilian lives and displaced more than three million people. Since toppling the democratically elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi in February 2021, the military junta under General Min Aung Hlaing has failed to consolidate its authority. Over the last seven months, the military has suffered a succession of humiliating defeats at the hands of opposition forces.

Myanmar is undergoing fragmentation: large parts of the country, including most of Myanmar’s international borders, are now under the dominion of various ethnic armed groups. These groups are expanding control of their ethnic homelands and building autonomous statelets…Many of these groups joined forces with ethnic armies that have been fighting the Myanmar state for decades. Violence has now engulfed much of the country, pitting regime forces against hundreds of resistance groups, from small units to organized militias equipped with modern light arms.

European clean energy demands blood minerals

Al Jazeera, 5/2–As the green revolution revs up, the European Union has signed a deal with Rwanda that will ensure a supply of precious minerals needed to build cleantech like solar panels and electric vehicles. What’s not to like? As the European Commission described it, after inking a Memorandum of Understanding back in February, the deal will “nurture sustainable and resilient value chains for critical raw materials.” But all is not as it seems. It turns out that Rwanda is a country that exports more than it mines. Vast amounts of minerals like coltan and gold are smuggled from the war-ravaged Democratic Republic of the Congo to Rwanda, where they enter global supply chains.
The racket has been extensively documented by United Nations experts reporting on the DRC war – a spillover from the Rwandan genocide, which has dragged on nearly three decades, the outside world largely ignorant of the widespread use of rape to subjugate enemies and the massacres that have killed a staggering six million people. The DRC says M23 rebels, who claim they are protecting local Tutsis from Hutu genocidaires in the resource-rich east, play an instrumental role in moving the goods over Lake Kivu.

War in Ukraine escalating

Sky News, 6/1–On Thursday, President Joe Biden partially lifted restrictions on how Ukraine can use military supplies sent by the US. "Russia regards all long-range weapons used by Ukraine as already being directly controlled by servicemen from NATO countries. This is no military assistance, this is participation in a war against us," Medvedev said." And such actions could well become a casus belli [an act that provokes a war]." He said it would be a "fatal mistake" on the part of the West to think that Russia was not ready to use tactical nuclear weapons against Ukraine - and spoke of the potential to strike unnamed hostile countries with strategic nuclear weapons…A Putin-backed think tank also suggested on Thursday that Russia should consider a "demonstrative" nuclear blast to scare Ukraine from using Western weapons inside its territory.

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!

BROOKLYN, NY, May 23 —“IF GAZA DOESN’T GET IT? SHUT IT DOWN!” And shut it down is exactly what a militant, multiracial group of overall more than 50 Kingsborough Community College students and faculty did! The fiery protest was sponsored by KCC clubs Common Ground and the Muslim Students Association, joined by members of the Progressive Labor Party, and led by mainly Black, Latin, Arab, Palestinian and immigrant women workers. The protest was against a campus event featuring a “former high-ranking officer” in the genocidal Israeli army, sponsored by a pro-Zionist campus club. 

When we learned KCC’s president canceled the event, the rally proceeded anyway, with student-led anger boiling in the streets over the U.S.-backed genocide in Gaza, and the support of local community mass organizations. Then, as the rally approached campus, KCC closed its gates — with the NYPD blocking all entrances and even local side streets. With waves of class cancellations, we turned up and shut down the racist  business as usual!

Women-led, multiracial student-worker unity SHUTS IT DOWN!

With the continuous chanting and continuous arrival of waves of students and workers, we held our ground at the gates and kept the main gate shut for almost seven hours, with all gates shut at one point! We easily drowned out the goofy, nearly all-white fascist counter-protestors, and one fascist professor who waved the U.S. flag near us quickly fled and later cried to the bosses’ Jerusalem Post that he felt threatened (5/15). Meanwhile, revolutionary communist PLP members led militant internationalist chants like “ARAB, JEWISH, BLACK AND WHITE: WORKERS OF THE WORLD UNTE!” and called for international working class revolution versus anti-working class “national liberation” and capitalism.

The only violence were threats from the fascists, who yelled out rape threats and one threatening to “burn down” the nearby halal cart – to which the lines of police guarding campus property enabled. Communists in PLP and more KCC students than ever know that the NYPD, KKK, Israeli fascists and CUNY administration are all the same! And so, many students on the way to campus stayed to join or watch the protest, meet Common Ground and MSA club members, discuss Common Ground’s leaflet and CHALLENGE, and exchange contact information. 

Illusion of democracy, reality of sharpening fascism

On the surface, the large police presence may appear like an overreaction. In essence, however, the all-out police presence - from the local precinct with reinforcements from Manhattan - is a sign of weakness and desperation from the U.S. ruling class. The U.S.’ democratic façade is slipping as the bosses are forced into supporting their most important imperialist lap dog, Israel, which guards U.S. imperialism’s vital Middle Eastern oil interests. In weakness and desperation, the bosses resort to open fascist terror. 

These aren’t the only illusions communists in PLP are on the ground here exposing. The administration claims they’re concerned about safety, but they spread tired ‘copaganda’ about the supposed violent intentions of the protestors. Almost no students believe this. They see an administration that refuses to send even an email about multiple hate crimes against a Muslim halal cart worker outside of campus, but is perfectly fine with thousands of students walking by graffiti that says “Kill Palestinians” every day. 

And the harder that Black Democrat mayors like Eric Adams push the illusion of democracy and liberal Black administrators at KCC push the illusion of neutrality, the more visible this reality becomes to masses. The bosses expose their own fake “neutrality” more clearly than a leaflet, and they can’t hide — we charge them with genocide!

Capitalist dictatorship and state violence

Unlike whatever the KCC administration, CUNY, New York City or the U.S. government claim, NO capitalist state —the government, cops, courts and legal system, educational institutions – is ever pro-working class, or neutral. The U.S. capitalist state has normalized fascist terror against peacefully protesting students against the backdrop of the declining, genocidal empire, with storm clouds of world war gathering around rising imperialist rivals China and Russia. 

Most dangerously for the working class, unlike the Trump-led gutter racist Small Fascists, it’s the liberals who are the Big Fascists. KCC’s “neutral” liberal -and often Black - bosses and campus cops especially love to throw around words like “safety” to pretend they care about the students, but they serve the capitalist dictatorship. Unless we fight for workers’ dictatorship and expose the liberal and “national liberation” misleaders – from Brooklyn to Gaza – they will lead us deeper into the arms of fascism and imperialist war. 
Workers’ dictatorship means smashing racism, sexism, imperialism, these racist borders and money. Workers’ dictatorship means we run the world - the student encampments showed we can! - and use workers’ state violence against the fascists wherever they crawl out of their holes.

Globalize communist revolution: build a mass PLP

Amidst the holocaust in Gaza, the times are clearly changing for KCC, this former Zionist bastion. The Nazi Kahanist Zionists lost their stranglehold over campus life. Soon enough, they’ll lose our local staff chapter of the Professional Staff Congress (PSC) too; as PL’ers and friends grow, we’ve only gotten started exposing the sellout liberal misleaders and revisionists. The future is ours, and the students and workers are proving that endless imperialist wars is not our class’ fate. 

Over seven months, the fascist Israeli bosses have slaughtered more than 35,562 workers, while dropping more than twenty times the amount of bombs the U.S. used throughout the entire Iraq War over an area not much larger than Manhattan. Only a mass working class-led communist revolution, from all the rivers to all the seas from NYC, Gaza to Shanghai and between, can free us from this imperialist hellscape. We urgently continue using CHALLENGE within our mass organizations to build a mass, anti-imperialist student-worker movement and mass PLP which every student, worker and soldier can join and help build: FIGHT BACK and JOIN US!

“Whose day?! Our day!! What day? May Day!!” A multiracial, multigenerational, and multi-gender group of hundreds of communists and friends rallied and marched in Brooklyn on May 4 to celebrate the fight of the international working class and our march towards communism. This year's May Day came seven months into the intensified genocide in Palestine driven by Israeli and U.S. bosses. Workers in New York City have since launched countless actions in protest, from blocking bridges to occupying spaces on college campuses. While many chant, "From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free," we sharpened this with internationalism to say, "From all the rivers to all the seas, communism will set us free!" 

Nothing short of a communist revolution will achieve true freedom for workers anywhere. The main speech embodied this idea, highlighting the dangers of nationalist ideas like Nazism and Zionism: “Nationalism is a fire that will engulf the world in conflict. From all the rivers to all the seas, only communism can put out that fire. It will set us free!”

Following this came a speech by an education worker who was removed from his teaching position for openly supporting students when they wrote a letter to demand the school administration create a space to mourn the death of workers and children in Palestine. He highlighted the power of fighting back as part of a party, specifically as part of Progressive Labor Party: “Ultimately, it was PLP that helped me and my entire school community fight against silencing and isolation. They helped give us the support to overcome cynicism and turn it around into a fight with the capitalist school system.” 

Before we kicked off our march, a veteran comrade who had just been arrested that week for supporting students at an encampment spoke, “there’s no better time to talk about communism with the youth than when you’re all zip-tied by police.” 

Energetic beats shook the streets as we chanted, “NYPD, KKK, IOF, they’re all the same!” and “Fight for communism, now's the time to free, free Palestine!” The community chimed in with us, some danced along, and several workers in the neighborhood joined the march. We marched past the blocks where Kimani Gray and others have been murdered by police and made sure to remind the NYPD and the community that we have not forgotten the kkkops’ crimes: “How do you spell racist? N-Y-P-D!” One attendee remarked, “This is the most receptive I’ve seen the community be on May Day. People were open to the chants and ideas.” 

At the end of our march, two student leaders from the CUNY Gaza Solidarity encampment spoke. 

They reminded the crowd not to buy into the bosses’ fascist lies about what the encampments stand for. A new comrade gave a rousing speech about why she joined the Party and encouraged the rest of the crowd join too, “The working class is divided by local bosses and held captive by nationalist ideas; the ruling class does not want us to see that we have more in common with the Pakistani farmer, the Congolese miner, and the migrants on Staten Island than we do with fascist Eric Adams or genocidal Joe Biden. Our destinies as workers of the world are interconnected. We depend on each other to live and fight another day.” We closed by singing the Internationale. 

As capitalism falls further into decay, its crises and fascism are on full display. Many have woken up to the lies of “freedom” and “democracy” that uphold this system. As they call for a new one, let us answer that call by saying, “The only solution is a communist revolution!”