Zionist Bloodbath in Gaza

APRIL 2—The “Bloody Friday” assault by Israeli troops against Palestinian protesters in Gaza has left at least 18 dead and some 1,500 wounded, nearly half of them by live ammunition. Dozens more have since been injured. All the Palestinians killed and wounded were in Gaza, some shot down for simply seeking to plant their national flag on their own land. It was the worst single massacre since the 51-day Israeli assault on Gaza in 2014 in which over 2,000 Palestinians were slain.

The March 30 attack was a pre-planned bloodbath against a defenseless population trapped in Gaza, an open-air concentration camp, imprisoned on all sides by Israel, Egypt and the Mediterranean Sea. In the days leading up to the protests, which numbered some 30,000 Palestinian men, women and children, the Israeli army deployed 100 snipers and several infantry brigades and chillingly made clear that there would be blood. After the massacre, a tweet on the Israeli military’s official account—later deleted—coldly stated: “Nothing was carried out uncontrolled; everything was accurate and measured, and we know where every bullet landed.” The slaughter can be seen on social media: a youth running alongside two others suddenly falls to the ground with the crack of gunfire; a man shot as he prayed. Even before protests began, troops opened fire with artillery shells, killing a farmer as he worked his land.

As usual, the U.S. imperialists backed the Israeli government’s mass murder, including by blocking a token United Nations condemnation. For his part, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu enthused: “Well done to our soldiers.” Several hundred Israelis have protested the carnage. In a piece titled, “The Israel Massacre Forces” (Haaretz, 1 April), Israeli journalist Gideon Levy aptly noted: “The killing of Palestinians is accepted in Israel more lightly than the killing of mosquitoes. There’s nothing cheaper in Israel than Palestinian blood.”

Palestinian organizers set the protests to begin on March 30, which marks Land Day, when Zionist troops in 1976 shot dead six Palestinians in Israel demonstrating against the expropriation of Arab land for Jewish settlements. The Gaza protests, known as the Great March of Return, are set to culminate on May 15, Nakba Day, which commemorates the Catastrophe of 1948 when 80 percent of Palestinians were driven out of what became the state of Israel. Adding insult to injury, the U.S. government provocatively plans to move its embassy to Jerusalem in mid May.

We Marxists fully support the right of the dispossessed Palestinian masses to return to the homes, villages and towns from which they were expelled. For this demand to be realized requires the shattering of the Zionist state from within through proletarian revolution. The Palestinian Arab and Israeli Jewish nations are interpenetrated peoples, both laying claim to the same portion of land. Under capitalism, the exercise of the national rights of one necessarily comes at the expense of the national rights of the other. Only within the context of a socialist federation of the Near East—i.e., the overthrow of capitalist rule throughout the region—can the conflicting national claims of the Palestinians and Israelis be equitably resolved. Defend the Palestinian people! Hands off Gaza! Down with the blockade! All Israeli troops and settlers out of East Jerusalem and the West Bank!