Israel Out of Gaza, the West Bank and Golan –
U.S. Imperialists Out of the Middle East!

Gaza Genocide Made in USA

For International Workers Action to Defend
Palestinians, Defeat U.S./Israel Slaughter

AUGUST 10 – Day after day, people around the world see photos and videos of harrowing scenes from the Israeli invasion and gruesome war on the Palestinian Arab population of the Gaza Strip. What is happening, and what millions are witnessing, is an actual genocide unfolding, aiming at the destruction of an entire population. The Zionist militarists are waging a one-sided war to drive out and decimate the 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza – who for decades have been locked up in the tiny enclave on the shores of the Mediterranean – while preparing a possible sequel in the occupied West Bank. And in carrying out this slaughter, the Israeli forces are dropping monster bombs, manufactured and supplied by the United States, from fighter jets built and supplied by the U.S. Without the U.S. armaments, it would be impossible for Israel to carry out mass murder on this scale.

The Internationalist Group and League for the Fourth International have called from the outset (10 October 2023) to “Defend the Palestinians Against U.S./Israel Genocidal War on Gaza!” (The Internationalist No. 71, June-October 2023). We underlined that the U.S. role in the war goes beyond complicity, that Biden’s vow that “Israel has a right to defend itself”’ and the huge U.S. supply of arms mean “giving the Zionist state a ‘license to kill’ Palestinians.” It’s not just “Genocide Joe,” as he is now widely (and rightly) known. His vice president and replacement as Democratic presidential candidate, Kamala Harris, is co-responsible, no matter how much she piously says she will “not remain silent” about the plight of the Palestinians. Her opponent, Donald Trump, would, if anything, step up the pace of killing. And the overwhelming majority of Democrats and Republicans in Congress voted to provide the weaponry of mass extermination to Israel.

This is genocide made in U.S.A.

The bloodbath is taking place before our eyes, and has been for months. Images of endless destruction as Israeli bombs flatten building after building, sometimes an entire neighborhood. We see relatives and neighbors desperately searching through the rubble for any survivors. There are the photos of hundreds of thousands trudging on dusty paths, forced out of their homes with only what they can carry. Ordered by the Israelis to leave northern Gaza, “for your own safety,” they are fired on by Israeli troops during their trek and subjected to more terror bombing when they arrive in the south, only to be forced back to the north. We see a mass grave in Khan Younis, southern Gaza, with over 100 bodies in blue tarps, brought from the north, where there was no place to bury them. Or the anguish of a young woman mourning her brothers and sisters lined up in white shrouds. We see Palestinian men rounded up and stripped to the waist to be transported to Israeli torture centers. With most housing destroyed, now they’re bombing tents. And on and on.

Israeli Leaders Call for Genocide

The attack of last October 7 (2023) shocked Israeli society to the core. It laid bare the bankruptcy of the government of rightist prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who had long encouraged funding of Hamas (Arabic acronym of Islamic Resistance Movement) by the Persian Gulf oil sheikdom of Qatar to the tune of over $1 billion over the last decade. He sought to build up the Islamists¹ so as to block the formation of a Palestinian state by the secular Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and its Palestinian Authority (PA). This has been a policy of the Israeli right going back to the 1980s.² It turned out that Israeli officials had known of the plans to attack for more than a year, and even had a detailed blueprint, but were supremely confident Hamas didn’t have the capacity to carry it out.³ And the Netanyahu cabinet, with its several fascist ministers, was so invested in backing up fascistic settlers that it pulled army units from the Gaza border on the eve of the attack to send them to the occupied West Bank.

The stunning attack by Hamas’ military wing, the Al-Qassam Brigades, dubbed “Al Aqsa Flood” (after the Jerusalem mosque), not only blew open and leapfrogged over the formidable high-tech barrier fence surrounding Gaza, it also knocked out Israeli military surveillance and communications systems and overpowered the headquarters of the Gaza division of the Israeli army. But beyond taking out the jailers of Israel’s giant “open air prison,” several thousand Hamas fighters and other Gaza residents poured through some 30 openings in the supposedly “impenetrable” barrier and fanned out to attack surrounding communities and attendees at the “Supernova” rave music festival. The imperialists and Zionists quickly decreed that everyone must emphatically condemn the October 7 Hamas attack in toto or be declared beyond the pale. Some leftists performed the requisite genuflection.⁴ The Internationalist Group and League for the Fourth International instead explained how Hamas’ random terror hurts the Palestinian cause and is fundamentally counterposed to any struggle for liberation of the oppressed:

Any real blow against the Zionist state by Palestinian forces, even by reactionary Islamists, is in the interests of the workers and oppressed of the world. But along with striking at the Israeli military, Hamas fighters carried out an indiscriminate terror attack, killing some hundreds of Israeli party-goers, residents of kibbutz communities and apartment dwellers in southern cities. This is not striking at the Zionist occupation machine but a random assault on Israelis that undermines the defense of the Palestinian people. Such a jihad (holy war) is the method of right-wing nationalists and religious zealots, such as the Islamists of Hamas … and of Zionist militarists of all political stripes. Now the misnamed Israel Defense Force (IDF) is doing the same on a far larger scale, against the entire population of Gaza. The toll will quickly surpass the hundreds of Palestinians the IDF murdered in its 2021 attack on Gaza.”

–“Defend the Palestinians Against U.S./Israel Genocidal War on Gaza!” (10 October 2023)

Some 815 civilians were killed in the October 7 attack, as well as 324 military, police and security personnel, according to figures cross-referenced by AFP (Agence France-Presse) and cited by Human Rights Watch.⁵ There are increasingly explicit reports that the Zionist military command issued “Hannibal Directive” instructions to shoot at anyone heading to Gaza, including if they had Israeli hostages, and that they ordered air strikes against their own base to prevent soldiers being taken hostage. There are admissions by Israeli helicopter gunship pilots that they fired indiscriminately, along the border and in the area of the music festival. Add to this  testimony by survivors that an IDF tank fired on a residence in Kibbutz Beeri, killing over a dozen Israeli hostages. And there is the photographic evidence from IDF drone footage of at least 150 incinerated cars clearly attacked from the air. All this indicates a significant number of the Israeli civilian dead were in fact killed by the Israeli military on October 7; how many is unknown, at least to the public.⁶

Nevertheless, the large number of civilian casualties in the October 7 attack on surrounding communities, as well as photographic, video and forensic evidence make clear that these were not “collateral damage” but were intended by the attackers. But these indefensible actions against random Israelis by victims of three-quarters of a century of Zionist oppression do not in any way or degree justify or excuse the mass slaughter of the Palestinians by the Israeli military juggernaut that is trying to finish off the people it has sought to drive out, and ultimately exterminate. This is what Israel has done in the last ten months, and as a top United Nations official wrote in leaving his post last October, accusing the U.N. of failing to stop the carnage, it is “a text-book case of genocide.”

Almost immediately, the most rabid Zionists who today govern Israel demanded vengeance, baying for Palestinian blood. In our 10 October 2023 statement we quoted Israeli defense chief Yoav Gallant’s October 9 announcement that he had “removed every restriction” on Israeli forces and imposed a “complete siege” of Gaza – “no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel” – spitting out that “we are fighting human animals.” This statement was a “vile declaration of intent to commit genocide” we wrote, adding that Gallant is a reputed “moderate” in the hard-right government. That same day, the Israeli army coordinator for Gaza and the West Bank (COGAT) issued a video statement in Arabic that “Human animals are dealt with accordingly…. You wanted hell, you will get hell.” Israeli president Isaac Herzog was no less bloodthirsty, making it clear that all Palestinians were targeted: “It’s an entire nation out there that is responsible….”

Israeli prime minister Netanyahu, head of this government of psychopathic mass murderers, declared the attack on Gaza a “battle of civilization against barbarism.” He cited from the book of Deuteronomy in the Judeo-Christian bible the story of the Israelites’ annihilation of Amalek (a mythological tribe said to have inhabited the Sinai and Negev deserts), saying: “remember what Amalek has done to you.” The biblical passage says that in response to an attack by Amalek, the Israelites should “go, attack Amalek…. Spare no one, but kill alike men and women, infants and sucklings.” The fascist ministers of Netanyahu’s cabinet were blunter: national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir (of the Jewish Power [Otzma Yehudit] party) declared that any who celebrate or support Hamas are “all terrorists, and they should also be destroyed.” Heritage minister Amichai Eliyahu, another fascist, opined that dropping a nuclear bomb on Gaza was “one way” to deal with the Palestinian population.⁷

Perhaps the most explicit was Major General (ret.) Giora Eiland, former head of Israel’s National Security Council and now top advisor of the defense minister. On October 7, Eiland said the people of Gaza “people should be told that they have two choices; to stay and to starve, or to leave.” On October 8, he amplified, saying “Israel has no interest in the Gaza Strip being rehabilitated.” The next day he added that, since water in Gaza comes from wells with undrinkable salt water: “They have water treatment plants, Israel should hit those plants.” On October 10, Eiland said “It’s either us or them,” that “the State of Israel has no choice but to make Gaza a place that is temporarily, or permanently, impossible to live in.” And on October 12, this architect of the war declared: “Israel needs to create a humanitarian crisis in Gaza, compelling tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands to seek refuge in Egypt or the Gulf…. Gaza will become an area where people cannot live.”⁸

The incitement to genocide became increasingly explicit further down the chain of command. An IDF colonel, deputy head of COGAT, said of northern Gaza in a video broadcast on Israeli television (4 November 2023), “Whoever returns here, if they return here after, will find scorched earth. No houses, no agriculture, no nothing. They have no future.” A fellow colonel said in the same video: “Vengeance is a great value. There is vengeance over what they did to us … This place will be a fallow land. They will not be able to live here.” Various members of the Knesset (Israel’s parliament) called for Gaza to be “wiped out,” to “erase” the entire territory and its inhabitants, saying “there are no uninvolved” and “there are no innocents in Gaza.” Israeli officials trotted out a 95-year-old participant in the 1948 Deir Yassin massacre (when over 100 Palestinians were murdered by the ultra-rightist Irgun Zionist terrorists) who was driven around in an army vehicle in army fatigues giving a “motivational speech” to mobilized reservists:

“Be triumphant and finish them off and don’t leave anyone behind. Erase the memory of them. Erase them, their families, mothers and children. These animals can no longer live…. Every Jew with a weapon should go out and kill them. If you have an Arab neighbor, don’t wait, go to his home and shoot him…. With all of our forces, complete destruction, enter and destroy…. Let them drop bombs on them and erase them.”

These genocidal appeals are pervasive. Former members of the Knesset called for a level of destruction of Gaza like that of the firebombing of Dresden, Germany, and the atom-bombing of Hiroshima, Japan – heinous war crimes by the victorious “democratic” imperialists in World War II. The head of a local government in northern Israel called to make Gaza “resemble the Auschwitz concentration camp,” the Nazi extermination camp in Poland. A former Knesset member called for the entire Palestinian population of Gaza to be killed: “I tell you, in Gaza without exception, they are all terrorists, sons of dogs. They must be exterminated, all of them killed. We will flatten Gaza, turn them to dust, and the army will cleanse the area.” And Israeli soldiers in uniform have been filmed (5 December 2023) dancing, chanting and singing “May their village burn, may Gaza be erased.”

There is no mistaking: Israel has been seized by genocidal hysteria. But note also that many of those who are hell-bent on exterminating the Palestinian population also see themselves at war with a substantial part of the Hebrew-speaking population. In particular, their hatred is directed at the relatives of the hostages, who have been demanding a ceasefire in order to get their loved ones back. Netanyahu has repeatedly blocked movement toward a ceasefire, and is backed in this by his hard-right Zionist Likud party, while the fascists of the Jewish Power and Religious Zionist parties have vowed to bring down the government if a ceasefire with Hamas is agreed to. Ultra-Zionists have harassed large demonstrations of hostage relatives, and recently invaded two army bases where IDF soldiers were being interrogated about abusing and raping Palestinian prisoners. There is rampant talk of “state breakdown” and “civil war” in Israel – but it appears that liberal Zionists would rather emigrate than fight.

Planned Genocide: Option Gimmel and Plan Dalet

As the mass slaughter of the Gaza Palestinian population by the Zionist army was unfolding, a professor of Holocaust studies at Brown University wrote an article, “What I Believe as a Historian of Genocide,” in the New York Times (10 November) quoting several of the above statements by Israeli government, military, parliamentary and opinion leaders, concluding that they “could easily be construed as indicating a genocidal intent. But is genocide actually occurring?” It might “only” be “ethnic cleansing,” he opined, seeking to “remove a population from a territory” rather than to destroy it. He worried, of course, that “there is genocidal intent, which can easily tip into genocidal action.” This specious reasoning only serves as a cover for the Zionist slaughter. The destruction of the Palestinian people in Gaza has been underway ever since October 7, it is planned, and the origin of those plans goes back to the founding of the Zionist state.

Already on October 14, the veteran investigative journalist Seymour Hersh reported on his Substack site on “The Plan to Wipe Out Hamas.” Hersh was told by an “Israeli insider” that Israel was trying to get Egypt and Qatar to set up “a tent city for the million or more refugees.” There was talk of placing it in “a long abandoned chunk of land in northern part of the Sinai Peninsula, near the border crossing from Gaza.” The idea was for the Israeli air force to “destroy the remaining structures” in northern Gaza with heavy “bunker buster” dumb bombs equipped with JDAM guidance kits,⁹ forcing civilians out to create a free-fire zone, a “concept” going back to the (failed) U.S. plans for “strategic hamlets” in the Vietnam War. But a “former European intelligence official” with many years in the Middle East said Egypt “would only do the minimum,” while Hamas expects Israel to turn Gaza into rubble: “They’re waiting for this.”

The insider account was confirmed and spelled out in detail a couple of weeks later when a document from the Israeli Intelligence Ministry Policy Department was leaked to the left/liberal publication +972 Magazine (972 is Israel’s international dialing code) and its Hebrew-language counterpart, Local Call. The document is titled “Options for a Policy Regarding Gaza’s Civilian Population,” and is dated October 13, the day before Hersh published his latest scoop. It lays out three options: Option A is the Palestinian Authority coming in, which is dismissed as presaging “an unprecedented victory for the Palestinian national movement,” by uniting Gaza and the West Bank. Option B is to have a “local Arab authority” take over administering the territory after a period of Israeli military rule. This is dismissed, since “an entire generation that has been educated under the influence of Hamas’ ideology and now will also experience Israeli military occupation” would at most produce “new, possibly even more extreme, Islamist movements.”

That leaves Option C, the “preferred option,” namely to “evacuate the civilian population to Sinai,” as the document put it. In other words, to push 2 million-plus Palestinian civilians into the desert. Nice word, “evacuate.” Fascist finance minister Bezalel Smotrich – who is also responsible for “security” in the West Bank, including arming the ultra-Zionist “hilltop youth” who are beating and murdering Palestinians – calls for “voluntary emigration” of the entire Gaza population. When “Genocide Joe” Biden and his secretary of state Antony Blinken talk of this, they refer to “humanitarian corridors.” It would actually be ethnic cleansing on a massive scale. At one point Biden proposed that Israel take a four-hour pause of bombing every day, for people to leave the north. Bernhard of the Moon of Alabama website put it succinctly: they’ll have 20 hours a day of genocide and then take a break for four hours of ethnic cleansing.

When challenged, Israeli officials (who confirmed the authenticity of the Intelligence Ministry document) said it was just a “concept paper.” How very innocent sounding. But when you look at the details of Option C, it spells out exactly what Israel has been doing: It reads: “Call for the evacuation of the non-combatant population from the combat zone,” then “in the first stage, operations from the air with a focus on the north of Gaza to allow a ground invasion.” This would be followed by “the second stage, a gradual ground invasion of the territory in the north and along the border until the occupation of the entire Strip and cleansing of the underground bunkers of Hamas fighters.” It emphasized the need to “leave the travel routes to the south open to enable the evacuation of the civilian population toward Rafah,” etc. And cut off all electricity, food, fuel and water. The “concept” is being translated into reality as the Zionist state has deliberately sought to cause mass starvation.

Where has this been done before? That’s right, it’s what the Nazis did to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943, when the left-wing Jewish Combat Organization (ŻOB) rose up against the SS police who were seeking to send them to death camps.¹⁰ The Zionists get upset when people refer to Gaza as the new Warsaw Ghetto, as we in the LFI and others have done for years. And where have such statements of “genocidal intent” been seen before? At the Wannsee Conference in Berlin in January 1942 where Reinhard Heydrich, head of the SS, called together officials from different ministries to plan what they were going to do about the “Jewish problem.”¹¹ Most accounts of the Holocaust say that this meeting decided on the extermination of the Jewish people, which in effect it did. But the actual minutes never mentioned that, instead calling for “deportation” of Jews from German-held areas. Just as the Israeli “concept paper” calls for “evacuation” of Palestinian Arabs from Gaza. These are in fact code words for genocide, and it isn’t just “intent,” it’s being carried out now.

The liberal media in the West, and in Israel, generally portray Netanyahu as an opportunist, willing to do anything to prevent the fall of his government, which could lead to him being jailed on corruption charges. This misreads Benjamin Netanyahu, who is a hard right-wing Zionist. His father, Benzion Netanyahu (Nathan Mileikowsky), was a close associate of Ze’ev Jabotinsky, leader of fascistic Revisionist Zionism, who called for an “Iron Wall” to push the Arab population out of Palestine. That is what the Israeli prime minister and his ultra-Zionist and fascist allies are now attempting to do, first in Gaza and then in the West Bank. But such plans are not limited to the Zionist right. Today we have “Option C” (or Option Gimmel, for the third letter in the Hebrew alphabet); in 1948 the “Labor” Zionists had “Plan D,” or “Plan Dalet” (the fourth letter), calling called for conquering Arab villages and towns on the borders of the areas of the “Yishuv” (the Jewish community) which became the Israeli state, and to expel the population from those areas.¹²

As for the outright fascist ministers in the present hard-right government, almost all are from the fascistic settler movement that has seized large swaths of the West Bank. The Israeli population of these settlements has swollen to over 700,000 and all (even bedroom communities around East Jerusalem) are blatantly illegal under the 1949 Fourth Geneva Convention (concerning areas under occupation), for what that’s worth. In 2021, Smotrich, now the overlord of the West Bank, published his “Decisive Plan,” calling to annex the West Bank and present its 3 million Arabs there with the “choice” of abandoning any national aspirations and living in an inferior status in Israel, or “emigration” abroad. Any who seek to stay and resist would be classed as “terrorists” and the Israeli army would set about “killing those who need to be killed.” ¹³ Asked if this would include killing women, children and whole families, Smotrich replied, “In war as in war.” Today, the annexation of the West Bank is underway.

Automated Genocide: Gospel, Lavender
and “Where’s Daddy?” AI Systems

To carry out the planned genocide, Zionist Israel has proceeded with a thoroughness and precision reminiscent of the Nazi planners of the Holocaust. Looking at the hellscape of Gaza today, most people would only see a jumble of rubble. But as spelled out in an investigation by +972, based on conversations with current and former Israeli intelligence personnel, including those directly involved in targeting and in air force operations, “Nothing happens by accident.” One source said, “When a 3-year-old girl is killed in a home in Gaza, it’s because someone in the army decided it wasn’t a big deal for her to be killed — that it was a price worth paying in order to hit [another] target…. These are not random rockets. Everything is intentional. We know exactly how much collateral damage there is in every home.”¹⁴ The Israeli military has detailed information on the vast majority of potential targets, “which stipulate[s] the number of civilians who are likely to be killed in an attack on a particular target.”

In other words, in hitting apartment buildings with heavy bombs that will flatten the whole structure, killing everyone inside, the IDF is engaging in mass murder in full knowledge of how many people will be killed as “collateral damage.” Not only that, the number of civilian dead permitted (by the IDF command) in striking at a senior Hamas leader was increased from “dozens” to “hundreds,” and since October 7 even the lowest-level Hamas supporter or any Gaza government employee could be targeted. In addition, the army has vastly increased the number of “power targets” to be hit, including high-rises, public facilities, universities and the like, whose destruction would cause a shock to the civilian population. In reality, “the damage to Hamas’ military infrastructure in northern Gaza during the first days of the war appears to have been very minimal,” +972 wrote, while their intelligence sources confirmed that classifying buildings as a military target has “previously been used many times as a fig leaf for harming the civilian population.”

The focus on destroying prominent buildings and whole neighborhoods is an outgrowth of another Israeli military protocol, the “Dahiya Doctrine,” dating back to the Israeli war on Lebanon in 2006. This consists of “causing mass devastation to civilian areas for strategic purposes” to cause “deterrence” in fighting guerrilla forces. The author of this doctrine was former IDF chief of staff Gadi Eizenkot, until recently part of the Israeli war cabinet along with Benny Gantz, who carried out indiscriminate slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza as chief of general staff in 2012 and 2014 and as defense minister in 2021. Yet these certified butchers have been marketed to the public as “moderate” Zionists, even as they signed off on all the terror bombing of Gaza in the current war. Their main reason for supporting a ceasefire was to prepare to expand the war to Lebanon. Meanwhile, the destruction in Gaza has gone beyond particular “power targets” or homes to wholesale destruction of all buildings.

Most significant has been the introduction of a system of targeting called “Habsora” (The Gospel), which is “largely based on artificial intelligence.” By feeding in vast amounts of data, including real-time surveillance, this system can generate huge numbers of targets almost automatically. As one former intelligence officer described it, Habsora created a “mass assassination factory.” It has turned Gaza from a vast Konzentrationslager (concentration camp) into a Vernichtungslager (extermination camp), in the language of the Zionist militarists’ genocidal predecessors. Now they annihilate whole neighborhoods alleged to be “terror nests for Hamas.” Destroying 1,000 “power targets” in five days – i.e., bringing down more than 200 major buildings a day – is the Dahiya Doctrine on steroids. A source who worked in the Targets Administrative Division told +972 that “It really is like a factory. We work quickly” and their performance is “judged according to how many targets we manage to generate.”

But that’s not all, not by any means. Yet another investigation by the +972/Local Call team, published in April, revealed that “the Israeli army has developed an artificial intelligence-based program known as ‘Lavender’” for “the use of AI to generate targets for assassination.”¹⁵ Drawing on a half dozen sources, all of whom worked in army intelligence during the war and had “first-hand involvement” with the automated assassination program, the article states that “Lavender has played a central role in the unprecedented bombing of Palestinians.” One of the sources said that “human personnel often served only as a ‘rubber stamp’ for the machine’s decisions,” devoting “only about ‘20 seconds’ to each target before authorizing a bombing – just to make sure the Lavender-marked target is male.” It works together with the previously mentioned AI system: “whereas The Gospel marks buildings and structures that the army claims militants operate from, Lavender marks people — and puts them on a kill list.”

The Gospel and Lavender, in turn, work with a third automated system, grotesquely named “Where’s Daddy,” to track targeted individuals for the purpose of bombing them when they have entered their family’s residence. “A., an intelligence officer, told +972 and Local Call … ‘the IDF bombed them in homes without hesitation, as a first option. It’s much easier to bomb a family’s home’.” Moreover, low-level militants were generally hit with unguided bombs (like MK-84s), which destroy entire buildings and all their occupants, because “You don’t want to waste expensive [“smart”] bombs on unimportant people.” According to several of the sources, Lavender “has marked some 37,000 Palestinians as suspected ‘Hamas militants,’ most of them junior, for assassination.” As a result, “thousands of Palestinians – most of them women and children or people who were not involved in the fighting – were wiped out by Israeli airstrikes … because of the AI program’s decisions.”

Behind the use of these automated systems was the change in IDF criteria to classify any member of Hamas’ military wing as a human target. “Once you go automatic, target generation goes crazy,” said B. This “senior source” said the use of the AI-aided systems was more accurate than human selection, even though early in the war it was determined that only 90% of the AI designations were accurate. Another source said “that they had personally authorized the bombing of ‘hundreds’ of private homes of alleged junior operatives marked by Lavender.” One might think that the revelation of mass AI-assisted, machine-generated assassinations of thousands of people would be so explosive that Israeli authorities would seek to shut down an independent media outlet like +972 Magazine / Local Call. But that does not appear to be the case. The authorities may even want to have this information out there, as a sign of Israeli prowess. But in any case, there has been almost zero reporting of this in the imperialist “mainstream” media.

2023: Planned Genocide Underway

Almost immediately after the Israeli bombing of Gaza commenced on 7 October 2023, it was evident, as The Internationalist wrote on October 10, that Gaza would be subject to “a racist, genocidal siege,” and that a ground invasion “can only be a genocidal slaughter of Palestinians.” By the end of October, it was estimated that Israel was dropping 6,000 bombs a day on Gaza. By mid-November, a statement of 15 United Nations special rapporteurs warned of “a genocide in the making” in Gaza, that the level of destruction of “housing units, as well as hospitals, schools, mosques, bakeries, water pipes, sewage and electricity networks . . . threatens to make the continuation of Palestinian life in Gaza impossible.” The use of “powerful weaponry with inherently indiscriminate impacts” had resulted in “a colossal death toll and destruction of life-sustaining infrastructure,” it stressed. In addition to flattening thousands of apartment buildings, Israel cut water supplies by almost 80%, shutting lines to Gaza City and Khan Younis entirely.

With the Israeli ground invasion, which began on October 27, the invaders made hospitals and other health facilities primary targets. By the end of 2023, of the 36 hospitals serving Gaza before the invasion, 27 were destroyed by the Israeli military, including all in the north, while the rest were barely functioning. When 471 people seeking shelter on the grounds of the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital were killed on October 17 by an explosion, sparking worldwide condemnation, Israeli spokesmen blamed a Palestinian rocket gone astray and publicized an Al Jazeera video purportedly showing that. But online researchers quickly showed that the rocket was fired from Israel, from an area known to have an Iron Dome air defense system. A week later a visual investigation team from the New York Times (26 October), usually a channel for U.S. war propaganda, definitively proved that the rocket was fired from Israel.

On November 15, the IDF stormed the Al-Shifa Hospital, Gaza’s largest medical complex and central hospital for the enclave. Israeli troops were shooting inside the buildings, looking for proof of a Hamas presence. Hospital staff denied there was any, but Israel and the U.S. insisted they had “intelligence” of a Hamas command center underneath the hospital. How so? It seems Israel built such a facility when it controlled the Gaza Strip from 1967 to 2005. But the IDF troops found no command post, no evidence of military activity, no entrance to tunnels, no nothing.¹⁶ After some days Israeli spokesmen led the media to film an entrance, “near” the hospital, to a small (180-foot-long) tunnel running under a corner of the complex. This proves nothing. If there had been no tunnels under Al-Shifa it would have been the only place in central Gaza City that wasn’t crisscrossed by underground passages, as Israeli military maps show.¹⁷

Although the enormity and depth of human misery caused by the Israeli bombardment and invasion of Gaza can’t be captured by the cold statistics of the number of dead, these tell us much about the nature of the slaughter. As of December 22, the number of recorded deaths reported by the Gaza Ministry of Health was 20,727, along with 54,036 seriously injured.¹⁸ In addition to those officially reported as dead, there were almost 7,000 people unaccounted for, most buried under the rubble of bombed buildings. Equally telling are the figures on who was killed in the Israeli onslaught. According to the Al Jazeera live tracker, of these more than 20,700 officially confirmed dead, at least 8,200 were children and infants, and at least 6,200 were women. In addition, the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor listed over 1,000 elderly people killed by the Israeli attackers. So three-quarters of those killed in the first weeks of the Zionist military assault on Gaza were children, women and elderly.

Such proportions are almost unheard of in wars between armies, where the majority of the dead are combatants on either side. In Gaza, the vast majority of the casualties are civilians. Why? Because they were killed in their homes by an automated murder machine destroying whole buildings and neighborhoods. In contrast, relatively few Palestinian fighters were killed. Why? Because they were mostly underground, waiting to engage the invaders. Contrary to Israeli psywar disinformation claims of Hamas soldiers surrendering in droves, the IDF’s method is to round up and humiliate any men that they find.¹⁹ On December 7-8, hundreds of men in the northern Gaza town of Beit Lahiya were stripped to their underwear, blindfolded, their hands bound behind their backs, and dumped into trucks to be carted off for interrogation where they were held in the cold for days with hardly any food or water. One released detainee commented, “We were treated like cattle, they even wrote numbers on our hands.”²⁰ Ever hear of that before?

Soon the executions began. Some were apparently random acts of vengeance, as when occupation forces stormed the residence of an elderly doctor and his wife, forcefully evicted and then shot them, leaving them to bleed to death in the street, and then set their home on fire.²¹ Or when, as the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights in Occupied Palestinian Territory (OHCR) confirmed, Israeli forces “summarily killed at least 11 unarmed Palestinian men in front of their family members in Al Remal neighbourhood, Gaza City.”²² The OHCHR alert demanded an independent investigation by Israel (!) and that “those responsible must be brought to justice.” The chances of that happening are, of course, zero. Others were clearly targeted assassinations, such as the murder on December 6 of renowned poet and English professor Refaat Alareer, along with his brother, sister and her four children, in an Israeli airstrike on his sister’s apartment.²³

But humiliation and torture of detainees, assassinations and mass murder by bombing by the Israeli occupiers tell only part of the story. In addition to the targeting of hospitals and schools, there are the attacks on mosques and churches, including destruction of the Great Omari Mosque, Gaza’s oldest and largest; the destruction of the Gaza parliament; the destruction of the Gaza Zoo; the targeting of all four universities and killing of leading academics, and the obliteration of the Islamic University of Gaza by airstrikes destroying all of its central buildings. The fact that this institution, which had trained generations of physicians and engineers, was hit almost immediately (October 11) indicates how important it is to Israel’s rulers to destroy Palestinian intellectual and cultural life. And then there are the attacks on U.N. personnel. Early on, the U.N. informed the Israeli military of the location of all their facilities, so they would not be hit by mistake. Immediately afterwards, Israeli war planes began bombing precisely those sites.

By late December, over half of all homes in Gaza had been reduced to rubble or heavily damaged. In the north, according to an assessment by geographers Corey Scher of the City University of New York Graduate Center and Jamon Van Den Hoek of Oregon State University, in Beit Hanoun, Beit Lahiya and Jabaliya over two-thirds of all buildings lay in ruins.²⁴ In Gaza City, up to 75% of all buildings were severely damaged or destroyed, with even higher levels of destruction in the city center, the refugee camps, the area around Al Shifa hospital and the port.²⁵ Beyond the hospitals, schools and universities, the list of what was bombed included piers for fishing boats, beachfront hotels and greenhouses, while orchards and much agricultural land including citrus groves were bulldozed. So there are almost no homes for the people of northern Gaza to go back to, and no way to feed themselves.

In short, the Israeli invaders set out from the beginning to make Gaza uninhabitable. Not only housing but any form of economic activity would have to be rebuilt from scratch. Readers should be aware that Gaza City was a modern metropolis of close to 700,000 people, almost 50% larger than Tel Aviv. It had huge areas of high-rise buildings, commercial districts, small and medium-sized enterprises producing for the local market, a bourgeoisie and a working class, not just the densely packed warrens of the refugee camps shown in the media. All of that was wiped out by the genocidal Zionist mad bombers. The imperialists back this to the hilt, while tsk-tsking about being more careful with civilian casualties. How would they react if all of Tel Aviv and its suburbs were razed to the ground? The destruction of Gaza is racist barbarism.

As the South African case charging Israel with genocide (submitted on 29 December 2023) summarized:

“Israel has also laid waste to vast areas of Gaza, including entire neighbourhoods, and has damaged or destroyed in excess of 355,000 Palestinian homes, alongside extensive tracts of agricultural land, bakeries, schools, universities, businesses, places of worship, cemeteries, cultural and archaeological sites, municipal and court buildings, and critical infrastructure, including water and sanitation facilities and electricity networks, while pursuing a relentless assault on the Palestinian medical and healthcare system. Israel has reduced and is continuing to reduce Gaza to rubble, killing, harming and destroying its people, and creating conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction as a group.”

2024: Genocide Grinds On

From the start, the Israeli invaders were relentlessly carrying out Option C of the “concept paper” of the Israeli intelligence ministry. This included preparing to force huge numbers of people into the Sinai Desert, as Seymour Hersh had also reported. As the IDF proceeded down the Strip, forcing the population into smaller and smaller areas in the south, in early February 2024, Egypt cleared a large area just to the southwest of the border crossing at Rafah to set up a walled enclosure to serve as a holding pen for Palestinians should they pour out of Gaza in the face of the expected Israeli offensive.²⁶ The area would hold 100,000 people, with no water source and no structures, just sand. Although the Egyptian government denied any such preparations and Israeli defense minister Gallant denied any intent to “evacuate” (there’s that euphemism again) Palestinians, satellite images showed 7-foot-high concrete slabs stacked on the ground, and large numbers of tents had been delivered to the area, according to sources.

With half of Gaza’s population of 2.3 million crammed into the area along the Egyptian border and Israeli leaders announcing an imminent offensive in Rafah, the stage was set to push huge numbers of Gazans into what would be a death camp in the Sinai. That this did not happen was likely due to the concatenation of a worldwide outcry against an attack on Rafah, pious calls by Biden to clean up the impending Rafah offensive (less big bombs destroying whole buildings and blocks) and the insistence of Egyptian strong man president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi that no Palestinian refugees would be allowed in. So instead, the IDF kept bombing Palestinians in their tent camps, including in areas that had been declared “humanitarian zones,” while pushing hundreds of thousands back to the north.

The focus of the genocidal war switched to causing mass starvation. Even the pro-imperialist Human Rights Watch (HRW) issued a report, “Israel: Starvation Used as Weapon of War in Gaza” (18 December 2023), documenting how Israeli authorities were deliberately depriving the population of food, as they continued to do in succeeding months, and still are.

From December 2023 to February 2024, the number of people in Gaza in “catastrophic” levels of food insecurity (starving or on the verge of starvation), increased by 80%, to 677,000, while the entire population was suffering from “acute” food insecurity, according to the international agency that officially decrees when there is a famine.²⁷ From an average of 500 trucks entering the Gaza Strip daily prior to October 7 (150 of them carrying food), by the end of February the number of truckloads had fallen to 90 (with only 60 of these bringing food). Meanwhile, the Israeli government launched a campaign to smear the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), which runs U.N. programs in Gaza, claiming that 12 (!) of its 13,000 employees in Gaza were somehow connected to the Hamas attack. As a result, the U.S., Britain, Germany and most other imperialist countries stopped contributing to the UNRWA. In an effort to sideline the U.N. agency, Israel announced that it would bring in food.

With 85% of the population pushed from their homes and famine imminent, next came the “flour massacres” – a dozen of them – in which Israeli forces fired on Palestinians desperately trying to get bags of flour, killing over 200 people and injuring hundreds. In the first, on February 29, IDF spokesmen falsely claimed that the crowd was moving menacingly towards the soldiers and two tanks “protecting” the aid trucks, so they opened fire. But even Israeli video showed that the crowd was converging on the trucks with supplies, at some distance from the tanks. And after the crowd fled in panic, when some returned to get the remaining sacks, the soldiers fired on them again. On that day, there were 118 dead and 760 wounded. In a second massacre, on March 3, nine were killed and dozens injured when there was an attack on people going to an aid truck. In a third, on March 14, at least 21 were killed and over 150 wounded. So to stop “looting,” Israeli troops murdered starving people desperately trying to get food.

This was followed by the World Central Kitchen incident on April 1, where an elite Israeli helicopter unit tracked a three-car convoy of the aid organization of the Spanish celebrity chef José Andrés and attacked the cars, killing all seven aid workers. This caused an international uproar, particularly as Andrés is a personal friend of U.S. president Biden. The Israeli high command declared it was “unintentional” and “mistakes” were made, but this is hardly believable as the delivery mission had been approved by the army, the convoy had been tracked for hours and the vehicles were clearly marked. Later it was revealed that one of two officers dismissed over the incident was the chief of staff of the Nahal Brigade, who is a religious nationalist living in a settlement in the occupied West Bank and who two months earlier had signed a letter, along with 130 other officers, calling on the war cabinet and the IDF command to “do everything in your power” not to allow “humanitarian supplies and the operation of hospitals inside Gaza City.”²⁸

Such incidents demonstrate that, whether particular attacks were or were not authorized by the high command, the military forces carrying out the war on Gaza are driven by its genocidal aims and a determination to carry out Nazi-like “collective punishment” on the entire Palestinian population of Gaza for the events of October 7.

Biden/Harris, Democrats/Republicans,
U.S./NATO Imperialists: Genocidal War Criminals All

As we and others have shown, the Israeli Zionist state – not just the hard-right Netanyahu cabinet with its fascist ministers, but also the liberal Zionist “opposition” (which only yesterday was part of the war cabinet) and the entire Israeli military – is the material perpetrator of a genocide now underway. Meanwhile the murderous attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank multiply: 587 killed since 7 October 2023, 570 of them by the Israeli military. Following the maxim “never let a good crisis go to waste,” the most rabidly genocidal Zionist rulers figure that now is an opportunity to carry out the historic program to “transfer” all the Palestinian Arab population – or as much as they can – out of Israeli-held territory. Such mass “ethnic cleansing” would be wrenching at any time, but with the IDF in the field and the Israeli Jewish population in a frenzy, they figure they can bill it as payback for the Hamas attack. Razing Gaza is only the start.

It’s not true that the Israeli government has no program for Gaza for the “day after” the war. First, it intends to keep the war going indefinitely, for now. When Netanyahu recently went to Washington and was told by the Biden/Harris White House and by Trump in Mar-a-Lago to wrap up the war, pronto, he returned to Jerusalem and ordered the assassination of a Hezbollah leader in Beirut and of the political leader of Hamas, Ismail Haniyeh (the main negotiator in ceasefire talks), in Tehran. So no truce, and the inevitable Iranian/Hezbollah response can be used as an excuse to further escalate into a regional war, which is what Netanyahu has wanted all along. In 2005 he quit the cabinet of Ariel Sharon, the butcher of Sabra and Shatila,⁴² over Sharon’s move to pull Israeli troops and settlers out of Gaza. You think he would voluntarily leave Gaza now, on his watch? If not, what then? As the fascist head of West Bank “security” Smotrich remarked: “If there were 100,000-200,000 Arabs in the Strip and not two million, the whole conversation about the day after would be completely different.”⁴³

But the genocidal mass-murdering Zionist leaders have partners in this monstrous crime: the U.S. imperialists and their NATO allies. As we have stated, without the U.S. heavy bombs, and without the U.S.-supplied war planes to drop them, this genocide would not be possible. Yes, the Israeli army with its Merkava tanks would still kill a lot of Palestinians, but with a total Jewish population of just over 7 million, Israel is “casualty averse,” reluctant to send troops into ground combat without heavy air cover. In any case, it would not have the military capacity to carry out mass annihilation and mass destruction on an industrial scale. But in the past ten months, the U.S., under the Democratic administration of Biden and Harris, has vastly expanded Israel’s arsenal to make possible the obliteration of the Palestinian Arab people of Gaza. And they are still doing it, providing the Zionist militarists with the arms to set off Armageddon in the Middle East by launching a war on Iran and Lebanon.

Israel has rained death and destruction on Gaza from the skies on a vast scale. According to an independent U.S. task force evaluating Israel’s compliance with “international humanitarian law,” “Within six months, U.S. sources informed a member of this Task Force that 300,000 munitions have been dropped on, or fired in, Gaza.”⁴⁴ In just the first month of the war, “1,900 heavy ammunition craters were visible through satellite imagery in Gaza, most of which in densely populated areas. Five hundred (500) of these craters were identified as greater than 40 feet in diameter, consistent with 2,000-pound bombs.” This weaponry comes exclusively from the U.S., as Israel does not produce such heavy bombs. This is also true of another of Israel’s weapons of choice in Gaza, the 250-pound GBU 39 “precision bomb.” And the 500-pound bombs, another IDF staple, come overwhelmingly from the U.S.⁴⁵

The Biden administration has been extremely secretive about the weaponry it has sent to Israel. In many cases it has not even informed Congress, on the grounds that it was only fulfilling previously pending orders. But occasionally military officials and pro-Israel sources have provided a glimpse. Last year, the Wall Street Journal (1 December 2023) reported that “The U.S. has provided Israel with large bunker buster bombs, among tens of thousands of other weapons and artillery shells,” since October 7, “including roughly 15,000 bombs and 57,000 artillery shells.” The article noted how the U.S. is publicly urging Israel “to consider preventing large-scale civilian casualties while supplying many of the munitions deployed.” The quantities transferred to Israel include “more than 5,000 Mk82 unguided or ‘dumb’ bombs, more than 5,400 Mk84 2,000 pound warhead bombs, around 1,000 GBU-39 small diameter bombs, and approximately 3,000 JDAMs,⁴⁶which turn unguided bombs into guided ‘smart’ bombs.”

Seven months later, Reuters (29 June) reported that the U.S. had sent “at least 14,000 of the MK-84 2,000-pound bombs, 6,500 500-pound bombs, 3,000 Hellfire precision-guided air-to-ground missiles, 1,000 bunker-buster bombs, 2,600 air-dropped small-diameter bombs” and other munitions, according to officials “who were not authorized to speak publicly” (but were clearly authorized to “leak” the figures). While Biden talked of “red lines” and made a show of calling on Israel to rein in its Rafah offensive, even “pausing” a shipment of 1,800 MK-84 bombs in early May, he later released 1,700 500-pound MK-82 bombs from that batch (New York Times, 25 July). A breakdown by the Jewish Institute for National Security of America added that the U.S. has supplied over 120,000 rounds of artillery, cannon and tank munitions and 2 batteries of Iron Dome anti-missile systems (with undisclosed amounts of ammunition). Without all this U.S.-supplied armament, Israel would have had to stop its bombardment of Gaza months ago.

Back in 2021, after Israel’s previous slaughter in Gaza, liberal Congressional Democrats, including Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, demonstratively opposed inclusion of the $1 billion Iron Dome system in an omnibus spending bill – but then two days voted for it in a separate bill (in exchange for more “humanitarian aid”), or in the case of AOC voted “present” rather than opposing it. More recently, in April, this media star of the “Squad” of “progressive” Democrats co-signed a press release that supported strengthening Iron Dome, as a supposed “defense system.” Yet this rocket system is an integral part of Israel’s war on Gaza, and one of the Tamir missiles it fires may have killed the 12 children who died recently in the Druze town of Majdal Shams in Israel-occupied Golan. Note that the Iron Dome battery, Tamirs and other Israeli-developed (and U.S.-financed) weapons systems are mostly made in the United States, by companies like Raytheon, Boeing and the Israeli company Rafael Advanced Defense Systems. In short, Israel is utterly dependent on the U.S. for its advanced weaponry.

One of the Israeli arguments for using massive 2,000-pound bombs in Gaza that this is in order to hit the Hamas fighters located underground in the vast tunnel system, which is estimated at 350-450 miles in length. But neither the MK-84, which can kill anything in a 400-yard radius, or the BLU-109 “bunker buster” hardened penetration bomb can even come close to hitting most of Gaza’s tunnels. The former can cause a crater of up to 11 meters (33 feet) depth, and the latter can penetrate 16 feet of reinforced concrete, but this would barely rattle the lightbulbs of much of the tunnel system, which is located 50 meters (165 feet) below ground, or even deeper. The reality is that these bombs, which really are “weapons of mass destruction” (the term U.S. war propaganda used for Saddam Hussein’s imagined nuclear arsenal to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq), are good for only one thing in the Gaza context, namely what they are doing: to destroy whole blocks of high-rise buildings, mainly apartment houses, and murder everyone in them.

Furthermore, when the U.S. Congress voted to authorize sending such highly destructive weapons to Israel, long before the current war, any member who bothered to inform him or herself, or even think about it for a couple minutes, knew that these bombs would be used to kill thousands of Palestinians in Gaza (or West Bank cities and towns). Using them in rural areas would be a colossal waste of firepower. In other words, the United States has knowingly, deliberately supplied weaponry to Israel that can only be used for mass murder … and genocide.

But that is not the only military hardware that the U.S. has been supplying the Zionist militarists with. Israel’s warplanes are all U.S.-made. Once upon a time Israel made a jet fighter-bomber, the Kfir (Hebrew for lion’s cub), an adaptation of the French Dassault Mirage 5. But the Kfir had a short range, a tendency to crash and were pretty much useless against anyone with weapons more powerful than an AK-47 rifle. So the Israelis sold off these lemons to countries like Colombia where they could be used (along with Israeli paramilitary “advisors”) to combat guerrillas. Today Israel’s attack aircraft consist exclusively of U.S.-built F-15s (75 planes), F-16s (343) and F-35 advanced fighter jets (50). That is, until recently. On March 30, it was announced that the U.S. would deliver an additional 25 F-35s, a 50% increase. Why now, as Israel has more than enough planes to bomb Gaza to oblivion? A clue: the long-range F-35 can reach Iranian targets without refueling, and its stealth technology could possibly elude Iranian air defenses.⁴⁷

As Israel already has a fleet of F-35s and experienced pilots trained in flying them, these top-of-the-line warplanes will be instantly operational. This means that Israel will have the second-largest fleet of F-35s in the world (Australia has 60, Britain has 29, Italy has 20, France and Germany have none, although the latter has had 35 on order for years).⁴⁸ In Israel’s case, these planes have been on order since 2008, when the Democratic Obama administration authorized their sale, yet only now are they being delivered. Quite likely the delay in delivery has been due to concerns in the Pentagon that Israel could launch a first-strike attack on Iran. Meanwhile, the Biden administration announced it would send up to 50 F-15s to Israel, again substantially increasing Israel’s fleet. The F-15 also has sufficient range to strike Iran, and while lacking the F-35’s stealth technology, it can carry a lot more bombs and missiles.

So now, as the Biden administration admonishes against setting off a regional war and making mildly critical noises about Israel’s terrorist attack on the Hamas leader in Tehran, clearly intended to provoke an Iranian counterattack, the U.S. is supplying Israel with the planes to “bomb, bomb Tehran” – as Zionist warmongers have long called for. It’s a repeat of the U.S. crocodile tears over civilian casualties in Gaza while supplying the heavy bombs producing the tens of thousands of dead. It’s all a charade to hoodwink a gullible public. With the U.S. elections fast approaching, the Democrats dumped “Genocide Joe” Biden as a liability, replacing him with his sidekick Kamala Harris, who says she “will not be silent” about Palestinian casualties. But she and her husband, an outspoken Zionist who led the Biden administration’s campaign of “antisemitic”-baiting pro-Palestinian protesters, are solid supporters of Israel. Despite this, many critics of Israel’s mad-bomber war (including the United Auto Workers) are all in for Kamala.

In many of the Gaza solidarity encampments this spring there were placards with the words and likeness of Refaat Alareer, the Palestinian poet and English professor assassinated last December with a precision rocket very likely supplied by the U.S. The placards quote Refaat’s 2011 poem, recently circulated online: “If I must die, you must live to tell my story…. If I must die, let it bring hope, let it be a tale.” Not so widely disseminated was another post by Alareer, two days before he was murdered. Responding to U.S. vice president Harris’ statement that she and Biden, while fully backing Israel, held that international humanitarian law must be respected, Refaat wrote the truth on X (the former Twitter): “The Democratic Party and Biden are responsible for the Gaza genocide perpetrated by Israel.”

As for Trump & Co., their attitude was captured by the Republican ex-president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who as a teenager had lent his bedroom to Netanyahu, who at the time was visiting his father, a major donor to Israeli causes. Last March, in a conversation broadcast from Harvard University, Kushner said of Gaza that Israel should “move the people out and then clean it up.” Kushner, who after being point man on Israel in Trump’s White House has now returned to his real estate business, added: “Gaza’s waterfront property, it could be very valuable.”⁴⁹ Crude, but very telling.

From the Middle East to the Imperialist Centers, Bring Out
Workers’ Power Against the Genocidal Zionist / Imperialist War

As noted at the beginning of this article, the League for the Fourth International emphasized from the outset that the Israeli onslaught against Gaza was a genocidal war, jointly waged by Zionist Israel and U.S. imperialism. We did so based on our Marxist understanding that, unlike colonial powers and many colonial settlers who sought to subjugate and exploit native populations, the Zionists sought instead to eliminate the Palestinians. (The United States, in its origins as a settler colony, did both, committing genocide against native Americans and bringing African slaves to work the land.) As the horror has unfolded before the eyes of millions worldwide, and the U.S. president announced his “iron-clad” defense of Israel, pro-Palestinian protesters and many others denounced the genocide. Many called for a ceasefire, and indeed, illusions of a possible ceasefire just around the corner have been used to keep Gaza solidarity protests from radicalizing.

We in the LFI have insisted instead that Israel get the hell out of Gaza, the occupied West Bank and Syrian Golan. We have also underlined that the Zionist/imperialist butchery in Gaza, like the U.S./NATO imperialist war on Russia over Ukraine, is a way station on the road to a third world war that can only be stopped by international socialist revolution.

We have sought to show in detail here that the charge of genocide is not some kind of wild exaggeration or fantastical construct, bandied about for shock value, as the Zionists claim, but rather that the slaughter is carrying out plans going back to the foundation of Israel. We have cited Israeli sources who exposed the workings of the automated and AI-assisted murder machine. The bourgeois “free but responsible” press, a/k/a “mainstream media,” in contrast, almost universally toes the imperialist line, slanderously denouncing even “moderate” protesters (including thousands of Jews) as “antisemites” while fascistic right-wingers of the Donald Trump/JD Vance ilk howl for demonstrators’ blood to flow. But many liberals, including U.N. and even U.S. officials along with numerous academic and other analysts, have dug up the facts reported here, in many cases suffering opprobrium or even expulsion and arrest for telling the truth.

So it is demonstrated, definitively, that Israel is waging a war against the Palestinian Arab population of Gaza as a whole; that this is mass murder on an industrial scale, that it is a war of extermination, and that it is a joint U.S./Israel genocidal war. Or more specifically, it is genocide made in U.S.A.

Armed with overwhelming evidence, the issue is what to do about it. Almost all of the liberal critics appeal to “international humanitarian law” and “human rights,” which the murderous U.S. government pays obeisance to while supplying Israel with the weapons to carry out the genocide. They cite Geneva Conventions, U.N. resolutions, verdicts of this or that international court. But neither the United States nor Israel will accept any verdict of these largely powerless pseudo-judicial bodies. The reality is there is no such thing as international law: the International Court of Justice recently (July 19) issued a statement declaring that Israel’s continued occupation of Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem is totally illegal, and it must leave forthwith – to which the predictable response has been zero. In actuality, the present genocidal war in Gaza is definitive proof of the hypocrisy of “human rights imperialism.” And as for the United Nations, it ordered the dismemberment of Palestine in 1948, after its predecessor, the League of Nations, subjugated Palestinians to the British colonial “mandate” after World War I. The U.N.’s hands drip with Palestinian blood.

Palestinian nationalism runs up against the hard realities of the strategic alliance of Israel with the U.S., NATO and all the imperialist powers. As we have written elsewhere, calls for “boycott, divestment, sanctions” are doomed to fail, as they are ultimately appeals to the imperialist rulers who are the guarantors of the Zionist state.⁵⁰ Talk of a “multipolar” world is a pipedream, as demonstrated by the failure of the so-called BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) countries to mount any real defense of Gaza. The stark reality is that defense of the Palestinian people falls to the international working class,⁵¹ and ultimately to the struggle for international socialist revolution to smash imperialism. That is, of course, a tall order. But just as Israel is a central axis for the imperialist world order, the struggle to defend the Palestinians against Israel’s depredations can be a linchpin of the struggle to bring down that order.

Unlike past genocides, recognized largely after the fact, we are witnessing this one in real time. There must be a struggle to defeat the genocidal war on Gaza. What’s crucial is the program for that struggle. While the mass murder in Gaza may indeed “shock the world’s conscience,” the warmongers in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem have the guns and the bombs, including nuclear bombs, and as their terrorist assassinations show, they will ignore any taboo to use them. The Israeli garrison state must be defeated from within and without, breaking the Zionist grip on the Hebrew-speaking population and laying the basis for united struggle by Jewish and Arab workers. Today rabid rightists and fascists hold the whip hand as Israel lurches to the right. But hundreds of thousands of Israelis have angrily demonstrated against the government demanding a ceasefire so the hostages can be released. Surely many realize by now that what Netanyahu intends will get the hostages killed, and the liberal Zionists aren’t about to stop him.

Let us be clear: Jews, who have been the victims of endless pogroms over centuries, and then of genocide by the Nazis in the 20th century, do not have and have not had a god-given right to dominate the land of Palestine. And let’s be clear as well that Zionist Israel is not a state of all Jewish people, tens of thousands of whom are participating in Gaza solidarity actions. Zionism, whose whole history paved the way for today’s genocidal war against the Palestinian people, has also meant ultimately condemning to death and destruction those who answered the call to “Aliyah” in “Eretz Israel.”⁵² A pseudo “Jewish state” in the Levant, this crossroads of civilizations, cannot endure by endlessly repressing and oppressing the Palestinian people.

If the Hebrew-speaking working people of Israel cannot make common cause with their Palestinian Arab class sisters and brothers against the capitalist rulers who exploit them all, then as the Bolshevik revolutionary leader of Ukrainian Jewish origin, Leon Trotsky, wrote in 1940:

“[M]ilitary events may turn Palestine into a bloody trap for several hundred thousand [now several million] Jews. Never was it so clear that the salvation of the Jewish people is bound up inseparably with the overthrow of the capitalist system.”

To which we would add that it is no less clear that to win the struggle for the liberation of the Palestinian people from the yoke of Zionist oppression requires a common struggle for socialist revolution.

A key force for such internationalist anti-Zionist struggle is the Palestinian Arab population of Israel, accounting for over 20% of the total and playing an important role in the economy. Israeli rulers’ recognition of how explosive joint Arab/Hebrew protest against the war could be is reflected in the arrests of dozens of Israeli Arabs (Palestinians with Israeli citizenship) and leftists on charges including treason and “conspiracy to commit treason” for posting on social media against the war and the killing of civilians in Gaza. Another key factor would be revolutionary struggle in Egypt and Turkey, with their powerful proletariats, against their rulers’ longstanding complicity with Zionist Israel. All through the past 16 years’ siege of Gaza, Egypt has been part of the incarceration and impoverishment – and now starvation – of the Palestinian population by collaborating with Israel in keeping the border sealed, in exchange for billions in U.S. aid.

As for Turkey’s president Tayyip Erdoğan, he has long had a relationship of off-and-on collaboration with Israel. Last September, Erdoğan met with Netanyahu in New York during the U.N. General Assembly. A few days later, he told Turkish media that he spoke with the Israeli premier about “what we can do together in international politics,” and that he hoped to soon “start on energy cooperation with Israel, including drilling.”⁵³ But after the Hamas attack, the Turkish leader changed his tune and loudly supported Hamas, equating Netanyahu with Hitler and musing that Turkey “might enter Israel” (!) like it did in fighting in Libya in 2020 and last year in support of Azerbaijan in the war over the Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh. Just now a scandal has erupted over a Turkish company, whose owners are close to Erdoğan, which has been supplying power to the Israeli army right through the Gaza war!

While reformists and nationalists call on Egypt and Turkey to break relations with Israel, a cheap gesture which would not change much of anything, revolutionary Marxists would seek to mobilize the millions-strong Egyptian and Turkish working class to bring down these capitalist regimes that have for decades been in alliance with U.S. imperialism. Revolutionary struggle throughout the region is vital to realizing the program for a binational Arab/Hebrew Palestinian workers state in a socialist federation of the Middle East. Most important of all for those in the West who have been fighting against the Gaza genocide is to mobilize the working class in the imperialist centers, from the U.S. to Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy and all the NATO countries. As we have shown here, cutting off the supply of heavy-duty weaponry to the kill-crazed Zionist militarists could put an end to the genocidal war, which Israel, with its small population limited economic resources, could not sustain on its own.

In the first instance, this means fighting for the mass workers organizations, centrally trade unions, to stop the flow of war cargo to Israel – and, in the midst of this genocidal war, to cut off all cargo and transport to Israel. We in the LFI do not embrace the “strategy” of “boycott, divestment, sanctions” – at bottom an attempt to get U.S. imperialism, the biggest mass murderer of all, to rein in its Israeli ally and client, which won’t happen.⁵⁴ But calling on the working class to use its power against the Zionists and imperialists is an entirely different matter. It is also necessary to fight for strike action against the U.S./Israel war, as some of the militant “rank-and-file” unions in Italy have undertaken.

Above all, the struggle is political. What’s needed is to break the working class from parties that are pillars of the imperialist system, including both wings of social democracy in Germany, the Labour Party in Britain, etc. In the U.S., as reformists unite to “take the demands of the people to the Democratic Party” convention, the Trotskyists of the Internationalist Group call to break with the Democratic Party of Gaza genocide and racist repression, and to build a class-struggle workers party to lead all the oppressed in the fight for workers revolution.

Proletarian internationalism is key to the struggle for the liberation of the Palestinian people – as well as anti-Zionist Jews and Arabs in Israel– from the death grip of Zionism and imperialism. ■