Down With U.S. Imperialist Support for Israel!

Zionist Killing Fields in Gaza

MAY 15—On the eve of the 70th anniversary of the founding of Israel, known to the Palestinians as the Nakba, or Catastrophe, the Zionist military machine celebrated its supremacy over the besieged Palestinian people in Gaza, killing more than 60 yesterday alone. Since March 30, when the Great March of Return protests began, over 100 Palestinians have been massacred and well over 12,000 wounded, many maimed for life. In a symbolic demonstration to mark their right to return to the land from which they were expelled, masses of protesters gathered near the border in Gaza and were pummeled with high-velocity bullets from Israeli soldiers on the other side. As drones dropped tear gas to suffocate the crowd, snipers shot scores of protesters in their legs for the crime of walking on their own land.

In Gaza, almost two million Palestinians are encaged by Israel and Egypt, surrounded by barbed wire, armed towers and the Mediterranean Sea. The vast majority of the population is made up of refugees and their descendants, driven from their homes during the 1948 war. For over a decade, they have been subjected to a crippling economic blockade and a constant military siege. Israel’s 2014 assault, backed by the Obama White House, killed over 2,000 and left the territory in rubble. With Gaza’s health care system in a state of collapse and the population banned from leaving for outside medical treatment, Palestinians have few options for survival let alone rehabilitation. Many gunshot victims are being treated by severing limbs, creating a new generation of amputees. One man captured the despair in the face of Israel’s all-sided savagery: “We’re dying slowly in Gaza anyway. It is better to die on the fence in an attempt to be free” (972mag.com, 14 May).

Some 60 miles away from the Gaza concentration camp, the streets of Jerusalem were lined with American and Israeli flags as a new U.S. embassy was baptized in gold. The moving of the embassy was not only a big middle finger to the Palestinians, who have long considered East Jerusalem their capital and a symbol of their national identity; it epitomizes the reactionary fraternity between President Trump and Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has furthered the brutal occupation of the West Bank, expanding Jewish settlements and displacing Palestinians. In a provocation that was both galling and deranged, the prayers drowning out any peep of protest were led by pro-Trump Christian-Zionist pastor Robert Jeffress, notorious for condemning Jews as well as Muslims, Mormons and gay people to hell.

The White House, which supplies billions in annual aid for the Zionist arsenal, blamed the slaughter on Hamas, the Islamic fundamentalist rulers of Gaza. As quickly as the war machine cranked up, so too did the U.S. bourgeois propaganda machine: headlines decried “clashes” in Gaza, equating the victim with the perpetrator. The Israeli garrison state and U.S. imperialism sell the lie that there are no innocent civilians in Gaza and that Palestinians are a threat to Israel by their very existence.

The oppression of the Palestinians, including those who are citizens of Israel, is not simply the result of Netanyahu’s right-wing policies, but is inherent to Zionism, which is based on the expulsion and dismemberment of an entire people. The “two-state solution” sham, premised on the ghettoization of Palestinians, has long been dead. An appeal for a “one-state solution” is, at best, an accommodation to the status quo within Israel today. Only in a mythical dreamland would the Zionists allow themselves to be outnumbered by Palestinians with equal rights in a unitary state.

After decades of betrayals by their leadership and endless imperialist-brokered “peace talks,” the Palestinian people today struggle for any semblance of hope. Isolated, confronting unemployment, starvation and destitution, and with thousands languishing in Israeli prisons, many Palestinians face the prospect of a slow death, a form of “ethnic cleansing” by attrition. As defenders of Palestinian national rights, we stand for the right of return for Palestinian refugees and their descendants. But within the framework of capitalism, there can be no just or egalitarian resolution for the Palestinian people.

The Israeli Jewish and Palestinian Arab populations are interpenetrated, laying claim to the same land. In such cases under capitalism, the exercise of the right of national self-determination by one people necessarily comes at the expense of the other. The way forward lies in the struggle for socialist revolutions throughout the region, including shattering the Zionist state from within through Israeli working-class revolution. Only in a socialist federation of the Near East can conflicting claims over land and resources be equitably resolved, and all discrimination on the basis of language, religion and nationality be eliminated. Hands off Gaza—Down with the starvation blockade! Israel out of the Golan Heights, East Jerusalem and the West Bank!