On the morning of this Saturday, October 7, Hamas fired thousands of missiles at Israel and broke into Israeli towns and cities around the Gaza Strip with numerous armed commandos attacking military bases and taking soldiers and civilians hostage.
The Palestinian people, fed up with years of genocidal oppression, responded with enthusiasm, mobilizing massively as thousands of young people spontaneously joined the assault on the barbed wire fences and walls of shame that surround Gaza.
Israel’s response was an immediate bombing of civilian targets in Gaza, including hospitals, and a statement from Netanyahu asserting that they are at war and that the Palestinians will suffer an unprecedented attack. The head of the Zionist army announced massive bombings and cynically asks the civilian population to leave Gaza, knowing that its more than 2 million inhabitants have nowhere to go and no possibility of crossing the siege imposed by the Zioist State of Israel.
Since its founding by blood and fire in 1948, the State of Israel has been a colonial imperialist enclave. It has perpetrated a genocide and ethnic cleansing on the Palestinian population, who have been forced to abandon their land massively, go into exile in neighboring countries, and live as second-class citizens in the apartheid of the West Bank and as prisoners in the enormous concentration camp that is the Gaza Strip.
Israel has ignored every United Nations resolution, continuing and deepening its colonial extension with illegal settlements in the increasingly reduced Palestinian territories, provoking, attacking and massacring the civilian population.
In recent years, the Israeli State has shifted considerably even more to the right and intensified its genocidal actions. It has not only legalized torture but institutionalized apartheid and its ethnic cleansing plan with a law that defined Israel as a Jewish State, limited self-determination exclusively to Jews, eliminated Arabic as an official language, declared illegal settlements of national interest and moved its capital to Jerusalem and appropriated it entirely, contrary to the peace treaties that determined the city as shared with Palestine and prohibited the establishment of either’s capital there.
Since Netanyahu took office for his third term as prime minister in December 2022, there has been a new escalation in Israeli attacks. New settlements were legalized and tens of thousands of new homes and colonies were planned, the death penalty was imposed for Palestinian “terrorists”, a definition that includes anyone who even throws a stone at a tank, and increased bombings have killed more than 200 Palestinian civilians so far this year, including the elderly, women and children.
Among the attacks that have generated the most indignation in the population, along with the escalation of violence in the illegal colonies, are the repeated raids of the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, the latest of which occured in April of this year, with Israeli police shooting into the mosque and beating and arresting people indiscriminately.
In all these Zionist actions, we must seek the causes of what has happened today, with the regrettable result of hundreds of civilian deaths and thousands of people injured. While we express grief over the loss of the lives of ordinary Israelis, we also clarify that such losses suffered by the Palestinians at the hands of the Zionist State of Israel over the last several decades are incomparably higher, and the so called international community, particularly the Western imperialism, has mostly kept mum about it. Violence by the oppressed can’t be judged with the same standards as the violence by the oppressor, in this case Israel, which is a nuclear state, armed to the teeth by the US.
Irreconcilabe differences separate us from Hamas and Islamic fundamentalism in general, which we consider a totally reactionary ideology and a product of imperialism itself, but our support for the Palestinian people to resist their oppressor, the racist, genocidal and colonial State of Israel, is unconditional. Every oppressed people has the right to defend themselves and fight to recover what has been taken from them. And it is a duty, not only of those of us who are revolutionary socialists, but of all those who love freedom and defend the rights of people to self-determination, to support the Palestinian people.
Israel has the explicit financial, military and diplomatic support of the US and all of Western imperialism, and the complicit silence of powers like Russia and China and also of a large part of the Arab bourgeoisies and pro-imperialist governments of the world. Similarly, regional powers like Iran, which oppress their own people at home, defend their own interests and are no friends of Palestinian people. The so called Palestinian Authority is also corrput to the core and play a collaborationist role. The primary victims of this process spanning over 70 years have been the Palestinian people. But they are not alone as they have the sympathy of millions of workers and young people throughout the Middle East and the entire world.
After so many years, it has been demonstrated that there will be no peace possible while the oppression of an entire people at the hands of an oppressive and terrorist state, artificially created by the imperialism, continues. Peace will come from the defeat of the oppressor and the construction of a single, secular, democratic and socialist Palestine in the framework of a voluntary federation of socialist republics throughout the Middle East.
After the Zionist state is able to restore its senses from the surprise attack, which reflects the biggest military and intelligence failure for Israel in decades, it will intensify its attacks on Gaza and other regions, and increase its oppression of the Palestinian masses. The armed conflict, relatively limited at the time, may also escalate into another regional war. It is the duty of working masses and revolutionaries not only in the Arab region but all over the world to agitate on streets, work places, social media and elsewhere against Israeli oppression and occupation of the Palestinian lands, and force the Zionist state backed by the imperialists into a retreat.
The International Socialist League (ISL) calls for the broadest international mobilization in defense of and solidarity with the Palestinian people against the new slaughter that is coming, and until putting an end to the apartheid they have suffered for decades.
Executive Committee of the International Socialist League – 10/07/2023
