STATEMENT ON ISRAEL’S WAR AGAINST PALESTINE
By International Left (OIR, Argentina; ¡Socialismo o Extinción!, México, Agrupación Marxista and Ecosocialistas, Bolivia and Left Party, U.S.
1. Last Saturday, October 7, the Palestinian organization HAMAS, which governs the Gaza Strip, launched a frontal attack by land, air, and sea against the state of Israel, killing 900 Israeli civilians and military personnel, with another 2,500 wounded. Also, at least 150 Israeli hostages were taken by HAMAS. This constituted a tactical defeat for Israel, whose air and ground defenses and intelligence were overwhelmed by the attack that included thousands of missiles and the invasion of 20 populated points inside Israel.
2. The bourgeois press of the world immediately condemned Hamas’s “terrorist attack,” ignoring the entire history of systematic Israeli air and ground attacks against the Palestinian civilian population, killing thousands of men, women, and children. The Hamas attack must be seen from this history of the military siege of Gaza: A tiny territory home to more than 2.5 million people, surrounded by concrete walls, barbed wire, and armed guards of the Zionist state.
The attack undertaken by the political leadership in Gaza expresses an untenable situation, where the Palestinian population, still living within the historical borders, within two concentration camps in the style of the Bantustans of the apartheid of South Africa. This perfectly characterizes Gaza and the West Bank, divided into three zones: north from Jenin to Ramallah, south from Bethlehem to Hebron, and around Jericho.
In Gaza, there are 2.5 million people isolated by land, sea, and air. Water, electricity, food, and gas services are supplied and entirely controlled by Israel from its territory, which was cut off at the beginning of this current conflict.
The “indignation” of U.S. imperialism and other countries of the world in the face of Hamas’s attack ignores the fact that Israel, in its permanent war against the Palestinian people since 1948, has already murdered hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, displaced and turned millions into refugees and that this policy of genocide has never ceased. In the last three years, Israel killed nearly 800 Palestinians before this attack. Today, the number of Palestinians behind Israeli bars is 5,200, including 33 women and 170 children. If tried, Palestinian prisoners are tried in military courts. The United Nations reported that since its occupation in 1967, Israel has detained about a million people from Palestine. Some 200 Palestinians have been killed in prisons.
3. To put this long oppression and current conflict, which is the most substantial historically since the 80s, into perspective, the chart below shows Israel’s killings and deaths in Israel’s wars against the Palestinians.
4. Israel has ignored U.N. resolutions against its violence upon Palestine. It has continued to kidnap Palestinians within their territories – Palestinians they accuse of resisting Zionist power. After this latest Hamas attack, Israel has unleashed an offensive that includes the mobilization of 100,000 military personnel, fighter jets, tanks, armored cars, and anti-aircraft batteries, including Patriot systems donated by the U.S. This Israeli counteroffensive has killed more than 1,000 Palestinians, wounded 3,000 others and destroyed buildings, hospitals, libraries, and thousands of homes… only in the first 48 hours of their armed response.
5. This is a permanent war between a poor colonized state with rudimentary weaponry and no viable economic base and an oppressor country with characteristics of regional imperialism, with atomic weapons, significant industrial development, one of the most powerful armies in the world and the support of the USA, which among other things gives Israel 5 billion dollars per year for its “defense”.
For this reason, this war does not take place between equals but between a country that is an enclave of U.S. imperialism and Europe. Israel was artificially created in 1948, massacring and expelling the Palestinian people to control the Middle East, then going through the revolutionary period after World War II. As a result, half of the Palestinian population was expelled to neighboring countries. In contrast, the other half live in Gaza and the West Bank. Both Gaza and the West Bank are and function as mere entities like municipalities, with local authorities restricted to a minimum and under the control and vigilance of Israel.
6. Hamas is supported by other fundamentalist groups in the region. Some Arab states include Iran, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and others.
7. Both Hamas and the government of Israel are extreme right-wing, both of radical religious fundamentalism. One Muslim, the other Jewish Zionist.
The conflict is between Israel, which kidnaps, murders, imprisons millions, and stays in power with methods of state terrorism. And Hamas, which is the poor Muslim mirror of Israel’s fundamentalism. Hamas rules with terror, persecuting adversaries and opponents and resorting to torture and imprisonment.
8. The imperialist bloc of China-Russia-BRICS sees the Israel-Palestine conflict as a stumbling block of the US-Europe bloc to all recent U.S. efforts to get Saudi Arabia and other countries closer to Israel. This is viewed with satisfaction by Putin and Xi Jinping.
9. Our organization rejects and repudiates the political regimes of Israel and Gaza, and we do not grant our confidence or political support. We repudiate the abductions of civilians on both sides and demand their immediate release. We condemn any execution of these in the strongest terms. For their part, captured soldiers from one side and the other must be treated as prisoners of war, ensuring their health, food, and a regime following the Geneva Convention. Down with the fundamentalist Netanyahu in Tel Aviv and the fundamentalist governments of Hamas in Gaza! For workers’ and peasants’ and people’s governments in all the territories of Occupied Palestine.
10. We are for the defense of the Palestinian people, for being the weakest and the oppressed. Therefore, we demand an immediate ceasefire, the withdrawal of all Israeli troops, the withdrawal of the U.S. fleet dispatched to the region, and an immediate stop to the war.
For the active solidarity of Palestinians in the West Bank, Lebanon, and Jordan.
We call on the Egyptian people to tear down the border with Gaza in Rafah, allowing the movement of Gazans without any restrictions.
Down with religious fundamentalism, both Muslim and Jewish.
For the creation of armed secular and socialist militias to expel the Zionists!
All the imperialists out of the Middle East!
11. We maintain that the only way out of the historical crisis of Palestine confronting Israel is the dissolution of the State of Israel and the creation of a Palestinian, secular, multiracial, multiethnic, and socialist state. We call on the workers and youth of occupied Palestine, from Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank, to form a joint revolutionary organization to eliminate their reactionary governments.