One Year After Israel’s Genocidal Assault on the People of Gaza

August 31, 2015 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

 

One year ago, Israel carried out massively destructive military attacks on the Palestinian people of the Gaza Strip for 50 straight days in July and August. In this extended slaughter, Israel killed 2,251 Palestinians—1,462 of whom were civilians, including 551 children. The figures on the Israel side were 67 soldiers and six civilians killed. More than 100,000 Palestinians in Gaza were left without a home they could return to. (Statistics from a June 24, 2015 UN Human Rights Council report and from United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.)

A year later, not a single home destroyed in that summer 2014 Israeli assault on Gaza has been rebuilt. The 1.8 million Palestinians in Gaza are facing increasingly desperate conditions. Since 2007, Israel—with the backing of the U.S. imperialists and in collusion with the current U.S.-backed regime in Egypt—has sealed off Gaza and restricted vital supplies of food, water, medicine, and construction material. Many people call Gaza the “world’s largest open-air prison.”

The horrendous war crimes being perpetrated against the Palestinian people flow out of a world order dominated by ruthless U.S. imperialism, and in particular the spiraling destructive contention between two outmoded reactionary forces—U.S. imperialism on one hand, and Islamic fundamentalism on the other.

Israel, with U.S. backing, claims to be targeting Hamas, the Islamic fundamentalist group that is the elected government in Gaza. Hamas does not represent anything positive for the oppressed Palestinian people. But the reality is that it is overwhelmingly Israel, Egypt, and the U.S. that are responsible for the immense suffering of the Palestinian people. Israel’s imprisonment and brutal oppression of the Palestinian people in Gaza and throughout Palestine was going on before Hamas. Israel is a country built on the ongoing ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people—literally built on their land and bones.

Especially now, at a time when the U.S. empire faces challenges from all kinds of rivals in the Middle East, and around the world, and is tied up in a vicious cycle of conflict with Islamic jihadist forces (at least with ones it cannot enlist in its interests at the moment), the rulers of the U.S. empire need Israel. Israel is by far the single most reliable U.S. ally in the region and has been an indispensable hit man for the U.S. empire for decades. That’s not hyperbole. Look it up in the special issue of Revolution—“Bastion of Enlightenment... or Enforcer for Imperialism: The Case of ISRAEL”—examine the map of the globe showing gruesome crimes Israel has carried out for the U.S. empire from Guatemala to South Africa (click here for a PDF of that map).

There are serious differences between Israel and the U.S.—they each have their own interests—and those differences are heating up with the U.S.-Iran nuclear deal. But the “special relationship” between the two remains in effect because Israel is so tightly woven into the U.S. capitalist-imperialist empire.

Stop and envision all that the people in Gaza are facing—in a world of outrages, this situation stands out as a crime that the whole world can see. And millions of people around the world have been mobilized to oppose Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians. There have been repeated attempts to break the blockade of Gaza, courageously going up against violent attacks by Israel carried out with full backing of the United States, including the massacre of nine people on the Turkish ship Mavi Marmara in 2010. (See “Two Years Since Israel’s Attack on the Mavi Marmara: A Massacre to Enforce Horrific Crimes.”)

There is a growing and important movement for boycott, divestment, and sanctions around the world, including in the U.S. The aims of the BDS Movement are summarized at the website bdsmovement.net: “In 2005, Palestinian civil society issued a call for campaign of boycotts, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel until it complies with international law and Palestinian rights.” Important institutions and organizations in the U.S. and around the world have endorsed BDS, and this has contributed significantly to shining a spotlight on Israel’s oppression of the Palestinian people and to exposing and isolating Israel. There have been important and inspiring messages of solidarity between Palestinians struggling against their oppression and Black people and others in places like Ferguson, Missouri, rising up against police terror and murder in the USA.

This worldwide protest and resistance needs to be supported, deepened, broadened, and taken much further. It points to the possibility of breaking out of the deadly dynamic of the contention between the “two outmodeds”—U.S. imperialism/Israel and Islamic Jihad. To fully realize this potential, bringing forward a whole other way, and breaking free of imperialist domination, requires an actual revolution—and it requires the new synthesis of communism and revolution brought forward by Bob Avakian, as concentrated in Communism: The Beginning of a New Stage—A Manifesto from the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA, and other material found at revcom.us.

 

 

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