2 Years of Genocide in Gaza
731 days of genocide in Gaza. 731 days of endless bombings, terror, torture, and suffering inflicted on Palestinians by the genocidal Israeli campaign. Israel has aimed for nothing less than the total annexation of the Gaza Strip via the ethnic cleansing of its 2 million inhabitants. In these past two years, the official death toll in Gaza has reached nearly 70,000. The unofficial toll is likely to be orders of magnitude higher. Virtually all of Gaza’s infrastructure has been leveled. Conditions in the Strip are nothing short of apocalyptic, as malnutrition has intensified over recent months in addition to the breakdown of health care systems.
Israel has targeted journalists, doctors, aid workers, and all of Gaza’s civilian population in their effort to annihilate its people. Ceasefires were temporary as the occupation and expanded military operations continued afterwards. With peace talks between Hamas and Israel in motion every day, no meaningful end is yet in sight for Gaza.
The world has responded with waves of protests, solidarity movements, and other efforts. The recent flotillas stand as a desperate attempt by the people of the world to act where their governments have limited their resistance to empty words and emptier commitments. Trade unions have mobilized in solidarity with Gaza, in opposition to the genocidal campaign. Communists the world over have made their stance clear, while the ruling capitalist class of every state refuses to budge, only offering token gestures to the suffering Palestinians. The Palestinians themselves bear the full weight of the capitalist barbarity against them.
In two years, despite the global wave of solidarity with Gaza, no force has been capable of halting the genocidal Israeli regime and its political, economic, and military sponsor, the US, with its allies in the NATO-EU axis and the reactionary Arab states. The Biden and Trump administrations both gleefully overlook the devastation in Gaza done with our weapons (money made for their capitalist friends, as they see it), with designs on an improved position in the Middle East and beyond, as the US confronts its competitors on every front.
The vile US-Israeli 20-point plan, spearheaded by the Trump administration under the guise of a “Board of Peace,” pushes a US “economic development plan” aimed at permanently disenfranchising the Palestinian people. It deliberately ignores the fundamental question of an independent Palestinian state, seeking to turn Gaza into a playground for business activities and profit — the so-called “Riviera of the Middle East.” The Trump plan is not a peace plan. It is a proposal to safeguard the economic activities of US capital in the region while turning the people of Gaza into servants for the ruling classes of the US-NATO-EU. It is a plan tied to the strategic goal of controlling the India–Middle East–Europe Economic Corridor—a counter to China’s Belt and Road Initiative—which depends on expanding US and Israeli influence in the region, a process sustained through acts of terror such as the ongoing genocide in Gaza.
Where can one draw hope from when, in the face of such horror, the entire world proved impotent to stop it? While the picture for Gaza is grim, the fight for a Free Palestine is not over. Millions live in the West Bank and refugee camps in the region. Around the world and especially in the United States, the Palestinian movement has been plagued by ideological misdirection. Without a clear understanding of the class struggle at the base of the Palestine question, the movement has failed to clarify its enemies and allies, thus failing the Palestinian people. Capitalism-imperialism, the world system based on profit and greed, drives the ruling capitalist class to take on such measures as the ethnic cleansing of Gaza.
One cannot stand in solidarity with Palestine without also opposing the capitalist system itself.
For an effective confrontation against the machine destroying our brothers and sisters in Palestine, we need a movement centered on the working class and its social allies. We have seen a glimmer of this direction in the recent strikes in Europe for the release of the flotillas. Trade unions, a few of them understanding the connection between the capitalist system and the destruction of Gaza and thus the connection between the workers of the world and the people of Palestine, took the initiative to call political strikes. These strikes are but a glimpse of the power the working class could wield in the fight for a free Palestine. It is our governments, our ruling class of genocidal capitalists, that bear the responsibility for the destruction of Gaza and its people. It is our duty to oppose them.
It is the workers and people around the world who pay the price in blood for decades of ideological mistakes. We cannot afford to continue repeating errors of relying on the institutions and agents of capital and its fight on the side of Palestine. The ICC’s arrest warrants are as good as dust in the wind. Recognition of a Palestinian state by many governments is only an attempt to get a piece of the spoils of war, and it does not halt the shipment of bombs and bullets destined for use on the children of Gaza. It is the task of the communists to clarify this approach, to demonstrate the systemic connection between the working class and the people of Palestine. The inability of the communists in the US in the face of the barbaric genocide to accomplish this task highlights the immense work and the moral imperative of building up the revolutionary forces. Two years ago, we wrote on the War in Gaza and the Urgent Need for Revolutionary Leadership. Since then, the war has advanced, the revolutionary leadership has grown only piecemeal, and yet the urgency remains.
Palestine is not lost. The capitalist-imperialist system exists for profits, not for people. The struggle for a Free Palestine is part of the struggle for a new world of socialism-communism, a world built on cooperation, solidarity, and true freedom. We, the workers of the world, have a duty to Palestine to fight for that freedom, and ours!