One Year of Genocide in Gaza: Intifada, Revolution
The Genocide in Gaza
Today marks one year since the launch of the Al-Aqsa Flood operation by Hamas and the immediate response from Israel carrying out a full-fledged genocide in Gaza. The scale of devastation and misery, the brutality of the hundreds of thousands wounded and starving, the ceaseless evil of the Israeli state, all of this has left the workers and people of the world with broken hearts and shattered spirits. Around the world, people have flooded the streets by the millions, students have occupied universities, workers have refused to load arms shipments—the global outcry for Palestinian liberation, for the end of the slaughter, has reverberated for an entire year. And yet the ruling class of every nation has responded with complete disregard, backing Israel’s murderous campaigns to the hilt.
Images and videos have poured out of Gaza daily for an entire year. Nightmarish scenes of Palestinians under Israeli bombardment have filled our social media feeds and news broadcasts with unceasing horror. We feel the tragedy in every broken scream, the crushing reality comes through in the face of every ash-covered corpse.
Israel’s aim is nothing less than the genocide of the Palestinian people. Their bloodthirsty bourgeoisie desires land and resources, securing trade routes, and improving the position of their monopolies against other imperialist powers in the region. The value of a Palestinian life is clearly nothing more than a business expense for the capitalists of Israel and every state supporting them. Every bomb is an investment intended to yield a return.
In this past year, the children of Gaza have borne an incomprehensible amount of suffering. 650,000 Gazan children have lost their homes, 25,000 have lost one or both parents, over 1,000 have had limbs amputated, 14,000 experienced malnutrition, and 17,000 have been killed. So many thousands of Gaza’s children snuffed out of existence, and those who remain will live with the scars of genocide forever.
Gaza’s infrastructure is in ruins. More than half of all homes have been destroyed, leaving over a million Gazans homeless. Most of Gaza’s water desalination plants have been either destroyed or inoperable for lack of fuel, bringing the average available per capita water per person per day in Gaza to 3 liters per day according to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics. Of the 36 hospitals in operation prior to October 7, only 12 are still functional. 80% of Gaza’s schools have been damaged or destroyed, with 212 direct hits, per the UN.
The death toll is staggering. 42,000 Palestinians have been confirmed dead and 96,000 wounded. The number is likely far higher as many remain undiscovered, buried under the rubble of their homes. Over 90% of Gaza’s population of 2.3 million people has been displaced. This genocide is ongoing.
The capitalists of our nation have the blood of Palestine on their hands every bit as much as the state of Israel. US Congress has approved $18 billion in arms to Israel, delivering over 600 weapons shipments since October 2023. The Biden administration has backed Israel unwaveringly, with VP and presidential candidate Kamala Harris re-committing to supporting Israel’s “right to defend itself”—it is clear the US ruling class is invested in carrying out genocide on the people of Palestine.
The Knife’s Edge Sharpens
In November 2023, we stated: “the war in Gaza threatens to boil over into a broader conflict in the region as the larger powers vie for hegemony…” A year later now and the war is here. The IDF has bombed Syria, Yemen, and Lebanon. Israel has conducted terrorist attacks against civilians in Lebanon with the exploding pager attack in September that injured thousands and killed dozens, including children as young as nine. The IDF has launched hundreds of rockets into Lebanon, killing nearly 2,000 Lebanese. The IDF has killed the entirety of Hezbollah’s military high command, most notably Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah. In July, Israel assassinated Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran. With their strongest ally in the region in tatters and a strike on their own soil, Iran has “raised the red flag of revenge” and entered the conflict as well. On October 1, Iran launched a salvo of 200 ballistic missiles at Israeli air bases. The IDF has vowed to respond.
The United States has committed to supporting Israel. President Biden’s National Security advisor Jake Sullivan stated in response to Iran’s missile attack, “We have made clear that there will be consequences, severe consequences, for this attack, and we will work with Israel to make that the case.”
With the ground incursion into Lebanon and exchange of missiles with Iran, the risk for wider war has materialized. The workers of all states involved will pay the price for the machinations of these competing imperialist states, as has already tragically been the case in Lebanon. Further escalation of the conflict in the region will bring death and destruction on an ever widening scale, all for the sake of profits for one set of capitalists or another.
The Urgent Need for Revolutionary Leadership Persists: Build the Communist Party
As communists, we aim for nothing short of the revolutionary transformation of society. This begins with the building of the communist party for the overthrow of the ruling capitalist class, to make way for the installation of the working class in power, to then build socialism-communism. This process—the revolution—cannot begin without the communist party. No vanguard party, no revolution. This is our stance as Marxist-Leninists. The history of the class struggle has demonstrated the validity of this path beyond all doubt.
Presently, there exists no such organization in the United States. No organization or party has as its base the revolutionary working class united with the conscious aim of overthrowing the capitalist class. We communists then are left with the difficult but inescapable conclusion: we must build the communist party in the United States.
The state is the ultimate instrument of class rule, for the subjugation of one class by another. In the USA, the capitalist class is in power, the current state is a capitalist state based on the political economic system of capitalism. Capitalism cannot be reformed out of existence by the capitalist state itself. The only course is for the revolutionary class—the class which has a material basis for its exploitation—to seize control from the ruling class and transform society.
So long as the state remains in the hands of the capitalist class, so long as the capitalists remain in power, they will operate in the interest of their class. This includes supporting the genocide of the Palestinian people. Many with genuine concern for the liberation of Palestine have angrily called out against “normalizing genocide”, yet we must recognize that so long as capitalism persists, genocide will in fact be normal. It is in the interest of the US capitalists to ensure the dominance of their interests in the Middle East. To this end, Israel acts as a bulwark of US imperialism and must therefore be supported without reservation. The extermination of the Palestinian people and the occupation of their lands is necessary for the Israeli state to secure its own monopolies, to provide fertile ground for profits over a mountain of Palestinian corpses.
What then can we accomplish? In November 2023, nearly 300,000 people marched in Washington DC demanding an end to the bombing. Again in January, 400,000 marched in DC. In April and May 2024, students all over the country heroically occupied their universities by setting up encampments, refusing to leave until police brutalized and arrested them. These demonstrations were organized by a myriad of organizations and activist groups. No communist party with the conscious aim of overthrowing the entire system led these marches. Thus, the US ruling class remained undeterred, the genocide continued unabated.
So many millions throughout the USA have made their stance known, have acted in valiant solidarity with their Palestinian brothers and sisters. This energy must be consciously directed towards the overarching goal of revolution. The schema laid out above, wherein the working class via the communist party seizes power from the capitalist class, does not happen automatically. The communist party cannot serve this vanguard role without leading a long series of arduous struggles in the daily lives of the working class. These struggles cannot be oriented towards winning reforms or economic concessions as a goal unto themselves, but must have a political character to them, a conscious ideological orientation towards the revolution. This is the class struggle, this is where the communist party is necessary. The connection between the genocide of Palestine and the working class of the United States lies in the fact that US workers produce the surplus value that the capitalists appropriate and then use to further their ends, to secure their investments and increase their wealth by any means necessary. In this case, that means funding the destruction of the Palestinian people.
With the ideological clarity and fighting orientation of a communist party in this class struggle, the working class can fulfill its obligation of solidarity to Palestine. Workers in ports, cargo ships, and trains could organize the stoppage of arms shipments. Students and workers at universities could stand in conscious solidarity to shut down their schools until they divest funds from Israel. Municipal transport and waste disposal workers could consciously fight until their cities divest from the millions in Israeli bonds they hold. These are essential struggles to build the fighting resolve of the working class, for the communist party to earn its vanguard role, for the working class to directly support a free Palestine.
The Communist Workers’ Platform USA seeks to build this organization: the communist party. We reiterate our calls for an end to the occupation and ethnic cleansing, the ceasing of all military and financial aid from the US to the genocidal state of Israel, and the recognition of Palestinian statehood. We call on the working class, especially those employed in logistics industries involved in military shipments, to boycott the supply of these armaments. We reaffirm our solidarity with the student movement, encouraging all to discuss, agitate, and organize actions on their universities to combat their institutions’ ties to the murderous Zionist state. We call on all members of the working class to mobilize in their workplaces and unions to support a free Palestine. Most importantly of all, with unshakable belief in the righteousness of our struggle, the CWPUSA calls on the working class to join our fight for a free Palestine, for a better world, for the revolution, for socialism-communism.
To the memory of every murdered Palestinian and to all who continue to live and to resist their Zionist oppressors, we owe them nothing less than victory in our united struggle.
The only way forward then, is to build the communist party.
LONG LIVE GAZA!
FREE PALESTINE FROM THE RIVER TO THE SEA!
BUILD THE COMMUNIST PARTY!
