International Socialist Center “Christian Rakovsky”
RedMed web network
Stop the genocide in Gaza! Stop a second Nakba!
Freedom and Victory to the Palestinian people!
No Justice, No Peace!
1. The Palestinian armed upsurge of October 7, 2023 breaking – literally and metaphorically – the barriers of the occupation surrounding long-martyred Gaza marks a breaking point in Middle East and world politics.
After decades, it imposed a humiliating defeat to the Israeli occupying army, exposed not only the failure of the all-powerful, high tech armed Israeli intelligence but above all of the bankruptcy of the far-right Zionist Netanyahu government and of the entire Zionist project and settler colonialism. The enormous shock of the mass consciousness of the Israeli Jewish population itself, in front of the civil casualties, dead and hostages, comes with recognition that occupation and repression of the Palestinian people by a supremacist “Jewish State” cannot provide any “national haven for Jews” but a deadly trap and disaster.
Despite the war conditions and the pressures for “unity”, already Netanyahu himself, his discredited ultra-right Zionist government, his fascist allies and pogromist settlers are taking the main blame. To cover up its own culpability the Zionist regime is now seeking to exact most cruel of revenges. The Gaza strip, home to 2 million souls with half of its population consisting of children, is now being bombed relentlessly by the occupiers. The carpet-bombing campaign, which also includes the use of white phosphorus in densely-populated urban areas, as attested by Human Rights Watch, aims at nothing less than the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. In the latest iteration of this criminal campaign, Israeli occupiers just bombed a hospital which also served as a safe haven for thousands of displaced people. Inital estimates indicate a death toll approaching thousands. Moreover, occupiers overtly cut off the water, fuel and food supplies of Gaza, already languishing under 17 years of almost total blockade. The cynical ultimatum for an “evacuation of Northern Gaza by its civilians” is nothing else than announcement for imminent destruction.
This inhuman ethnic cleansing unfolding under the eyes of the entire humankind is met by the thunderous applause of world imperialism – euphemistically called the “international community”. From the US to France, imperialists and open fascists like Meloni, Le Pen and Zemmour, try to criminalize peaceful objections, threaten even to disband left political parties, organizations, and movements that condemn the genocide of Palestinian people presenting them as defenders of… “terrorism”.
The war conflagration is not between Hamas or Gaza and Israel but between Palestinian slaves in their own land against Zionist Occupation, apartheid, inhuman repression and sufferings of 75 years.
It is an absolute hypocrisy to distinguish between “good” civilians dead to be mourned and “bad” civilians dead to be ignored. The real culprits of the crime and the real roots of the tragedy have to be revealed and fought back. No justice, no peace!
Without giving any political support to Hamas, its reactionary methods and strategy (or the lack of it), we are not neutral in the clash between slaves in rebellion and their oppressors, those who are calling now to “erase Gaza” and to exterminate Palestinians as “human animals” according to the Nazi language used by Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. We stand with the Palestinian resistance, in its rightful struggle against the Zionist occupier and its international imperialist backers in the “collective West”.
Against the imperialist-Zionist coalition of genocide, and notwithstanding police terror and interdiction orders, we join forces with workers and youth all over the world taking the streets to stand with Palestine, for freedom and victory to the fighting Palestinian people.
2. The new Palestinian upsurge is interconnected with the advanced process of exhaustion of the Zionist settler colonialist project that is breaking apart. Throughout 2023, from January to October 7, a majority of the Israeli Jewish population was mobilized in non-stop mass demonstrations against the judicial coup by the Netanyahu far right government. The split both in the State and society was and remains deep, transversal and irreparable. The unseen “elephant in the room” was the fate of the Palestinian people until the moment of truth. No freedom for any people can exist with Occupation, settler colonialism, apartheid and ethnic cleansing of another people in its occupied land.
Netanyahu accommodated his policies to the demands of his fascist allies in power such as Itamar ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich to concentrate the main repressive forces and escalate all military, police and settler paramilitary violence in the West Bank with the deliberate strategic aims of expulsion of the Palestinians, annexation of the West Bank, even of... Jordan as publicly declared the minister Smotrich! They had the illusion that they had under control Gaza, the greatest open air prison in the world, with a starving overcrowded population surviving in appalling conditions, under permanent asphyxiating siege, submitted to 6 bloody wars of aggression in 17 years. It was not Iran (which was surprised as well on October 7, according even to Western sources) but protracted hellish national oppression and social destruction that led to the war explosion and the “Al Aqsa Flood” operation named after the recent Al Aqsa Mosque profanation by the provocateur Itamar ben Gvir and his fascist thugs and for the liberation of the Palestinian prisoners.
3. The geopolitical map in the region and internationally has dramatically changed., bringing again at the center the just Palestinian cause that US imperialism, Zionism, and the Arab reactionary rulers tried to totally eliminate.
On September 22, Netanyahu, full of arrogance, had presented in the United Nations the green map of a non-existent “New Middle East” composed by Israel, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain, with a “Prosperity Road” from Dubai through Israel to Southern Europe, and where the Palestinian people was absolutely eliminated. On the eve of the new war, United States imperialism mediated a critical “normalization” between Saudi Arabia and Israel as the culmination of the infamous misnamed “Abraham Accords” initiated by Trump, and as a counter-measure against the surprising new approach between Iran and Saudi Arabia made possible by China. All these machinations are now in ruins.
After the counterrevolution that followed the revolutionary tide of the Arab Spring, the reactionary Arab ruling classes and governments are again threatened by the millions of the Arab masses demonstrating in the streets their solidarity to the fighting Palestinian people.
US imperialism and NATO sent their air-carriers and battleships near the coasts of Gaza and Lebanon, threatening Hezbollah and Iran to not intervene in defense of the Palestinians. The EU Commission chair Ursula von der Leyen went to Israel and provocatively stood by Netanyahu and his genocidal war policies, although the EU as a whole is deeply divided on the issue. Blinken comes and goes to Israel and there is an international diplomatic frenzy to avoid a generalized chaos threatening their geopolitical interests An extension of the war to Lebanon or Iran and the entire Middle East will supersede what so far brought the NATO proxy war in Ukraine against Russia, and it will accelerate the imperialist drive of a global “hybrid” war.
The two combined war conflagrations at the heart of Europe and at the heart of the Middle East clearly demonstrate the historic decline of US and global capitalism. The fiasco of the US “terror’ wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the “pivot to Asia” against the rising China initiated by Obama, and continued by his successors Trump and Biden marked the abandoning of the centrality of the Middle East in the US strategy to save its world hegemony. Now the new volcanic eruption in the Middle East not only brings it to the center of world developments but also gives a huge blow to the US strategy for world hegemony.
Above all, a new spiral of the spiraling, still unresolved but sharpening post -2008 global capitalist crisis has started bringing great dangers but also great revolutionary possibilities.
4. It is the immediate duty and historical task of the international working class and of all oppressed of the world to mobilize against the threatening international catastrophe, against the destruction of Gaza and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians by the revengeful reactionary war of the imperialist and Zionist culprits of the tragedy, and for their defeat. Accordingly, we call all the working-class organizations and trade-unions to heed the call of Palestinian trade-unions, and show solidarity in action by refusing to produce and carry armaments for Israel and by actively refusing any activity that might help Israel’s genocidal military campaign.
People across the world, should also immediately move to organize and support the international call to boycott Israel and implement divestments and sanctions on it. In any way we can, the time is to cripple Israel’s imperialist-backed genocide.
Despite the growing rivers of blood, we have to make a tiger’s leap over the abyss: to fight for the unity of all oppressed |Palestinian Arabs and Jews that only an international socialist perspective, program and organization can fight for and achieve. For the national liberation of the Palestinian people in a Free, Independent and Socialist Republic, living together with the Jewish toilers, in the framework of a Socialist Federation of the Middle East.
The International Socialist Center“Christian Rakovsky”
The RedMed web network
October 15, 2023