Catastrophe in Palestine and Israel: Apartheid on the Road to Genocide
FRIDAY 17 NOVEMBER 2023, BY DAVID FINKEL
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ON THE MORNING of October 7, the nemesis that the Israeli state did much to create smashed over, under and through the border wall separating Gaza’s “open air prison” from southern Israel. The brutal events that followed have opened the gates of hell — even wider than usual — in the Middle East.
Any number of illusions lie shattered, beginning with the biggest — the United States’ government’s view that a brokered “normalization” of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia, plus other Arab Gulf monarchies, would make Palestine essentially disappear from view. It’s essential to state up front the fundamental lesson that U.S. policy, enabling Israel’s continual destruction of Palestine and its people’s hopes, have made the 100-year Palestine-Zionist conflict into a permanent crisis with little hope of resolution.
At this writing the odds of an even bigger regional war, which no state actor wants, are unknown — “God forbid,” in the words of professor Rashid Khalidi. But every day’s events are more than horrific enough. They cannot be chronicled here, but where they’re all too clearly leading has brought literally millions of people into the streets of the world demanding that the slaughter of Gaza end.
The editors have discussed the U.S. government’s pretense of caring about Palestine in our previous editorial, “Palestine and Empire” (ATC 226). Although outdated by the current catastrophe, it may help provide a bit of background.
Also gone was Israel’s “security” illusion of impenetrable walls, world-class surveillance technology, all-pervasive intelligence and the certainty of massive retaliation assuring that Hamas was “deterred,” as a high-ranking Israeli officials repeatedly boasted. It’s replaced by even deadlier delusions that the promised “complete destruction” of Hamas, which can’t be accomplished without tens and probably hundreds of thousands of deaths in Gaza, will bring safety.
An illusion among some pro-Palestinian activists — that the Hamas attack represented an advance for the resistance and liberation struggle — also needs to be analyzed. Briefly put, the deaths of 1400 Israelis, mostly civilians, is catastrophic for the Israeli population but doesn’t threaten the state. That will be discussed below.
MAPPING THE CATASTROPHE
Israel’s government of Benjamin “Mr. Security” Netanyahu is the most viciously racist, anti-democratic and incompetent, and one of the most corrupt — although there is competition for that distinction — in the country’s history. It is now probably also the most widely reviled for its catastrophic failures.
In fact, Israel’s mass bombing and invasion of Gaza has one overriding priority beyond all other considerations — keeping Netanyahu’s coalition in power and himself out of prison on multiple corruption charges. Neither Palestinian, nor Israeli, nor hostages’ lives can get in the way of that supreme goal.
Because the coalition depends on the support of the fascistic, open ethnic-cleansing Jewish Power and Religious Zionism Ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, the dimensions of the war are literally genocidal. That potential has been present in Israeli politics all along, but Netanyahu’s need to hold political office for protection from prosecution (sound familiar?) overrides certain restraints on all-out destruction that global politics and U.S. interests usually impose.
Mustafa Barghouti, a physician in Ramallah and president of the Palestinian National Initiative, has repeatedly warned (for example on “Democracy Now,” October 19) of a scenario where Israel depopulates and annexes northern Gaza, then turns to ethnically cleansing and annexing the West Bank.
“I never thought I would see Israel carrying out ethnic cleansing in the 21st century,” says Dr. Barghouti, “but I admit I was wrong.” For a similar warning, see “Gaza: between a second Nakba and the revival of the Oslo fiction.”
In the immediate shock of October 7, with reports from southern Israel exploding in much of the world and especially in the United States, years of accumulating support for the Palestinian people’s suffering under occupation began dissolving. The scale and brutality of the Hamas killings generated instantaneous sympathy for Israel. Within a week, in turn, Israel’s massive bombing, “total siege” and pending invasion of Gaza was converting much of that sympathy to revulsion.
Since then, we are frequently instructed that Israel’s “right to defend itself” overrides consideration of the underlying conditions and history that produced the present situation. All that should wait till “Hamas terror is finished once and for all.”
With all due disrespect, I must insist that the opposite is true. As Israeli apartheid embarks on the road toward genocide that many observers have warned as a potential outcome, you can’t know where that road is going without some understanding of where it’s coming from.
BIRTHING THE FUNDAMENTALIST NEMESIS
Back in spring 1982 I was on a delegation of leftwing journalists to the Occupied Palestinian Territories and Israel, when we visited Bir Zeit University in the occupied West Bank. In addition to Israeli blockades and continual harassment of the school, the nationalist students, supporters of the Palestine Liberation Organization, also told us how Israeli authorities were allowing free passage to rightwing Islamists from Gaza to disrupt their campus activities.
That was an ominous foretaste of Israel’s preference then for Islamic fundamentalism over Palestinian nationalism. This cynical enemy-of-my-enemy ploy was not dissimilar to what the United States was carrying out in the same period — supporting Osama bin Laden’s Islamic fundamentalist force in Afghanistan against the Soviets, which became al-Qaeda and would ultimately perpetrate the September 11, 2001 attacks.
Our discussion at Bir Zeit, as it happened, was only months before Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, culminating in the September Sabra and Shatila refugee camp massacres and the expulsion of the PLO from Beirut.
It was a massive defeat for Palestinian nationalism, and also produced the rise in Lebanon (with Iranian sponsorship) of the Shia fundamentalist movement Hezbollah, which became and remains Israel’s most significant military adversary.
Hamas (an Arabic acronym for Islamic Resistance Movement) formed in 1987, a Gaza wing of the Egyptian-based Muslim Brotherhood. By the mid-2000s, Hamas was gaining strength to fill the vacuum of effective resistance with the decline of the Palestinian left and the Israeli-U.S. success in turning the Palestinian National Authority (PA, created following the 1993 Oslo Accords) into a client of the Occupation.
Even while Israeli settlements spread like an uncontrolled cancer in the West Bank, in 2006 a remarkable breakthrough took place in Palestinian life. An election in the West Bank and Gaza for leadership of the PA was declared free and fair by the Carter Center, and widely viewed as a democratic example for the Middle East.
To the surprise of everyone — including Hamas — the Islamist movement won, defeating the dominant PLO faction (Fatah). A horrified U.S. Senator Hillary Clinton bewailed the failure of the United States to ensure the election result would come out differently.
Yasser Arafat, longtime leader of the PLO and the symbol of Palestinian nationalism, had died in 2004 (quite likely poisoned by Israeli agents although the assassination was never acknowledged). With the PLO’s popular support dramatically declining, both parties recognized the reality of their fragile voting bases — most people had not voted for Islamic fundamentalist ideology, but rather in protest against the PA’s and PLO’s incompetence and corruption.
Accordingly, Fatah and Hamas initiated a process of forming a Palestinian unity government. That exercise in Palestinian democratic politics was absolutely unacceptable to the United States and Israel. What happened next was told by journalist David Rose in an investigative report “The Gaza Bombshell” (Vanity Fair, April 2008). As the article’s introduction summarizes:
After failing to anticipate Hamas’s victory over Fatah in the 2006 Palestinian election, the White House cooked up yet another scandalously covert and self-defeating Middle East debacle: part Iran-contra, part Bay of Pigs. With confidential documents, corroborated by outraged former and current U.S. officials, the author reveals how President Bush, Condoleezza Rice, and Deputy National-Security Adviser Elliott Abrams backed an armed force under Fatah strongman Muhammad Dahlan, touching off a bloody civil war in Gaza and leaving Hamas stronger than ever.
The coup failed, leaving the remnant of the PLO administering the Palestinian Authority in the scraps of territory left to it in the West Bank. Hamas consolidated its control of Gaza.
The strip of land has remained ever since under tightening Israeli siege, periodic operations that Israeli officials call “mowing the grass” with targeted assassinations and bombing civilian infrastructure, food supplies restricted to subsistence levels, electricity supplied for a few hours daily, water increasingly undrinkable, and the matrix of horrors chronicled in unbearable but essential detail in Norman Finkelstein’s book Gaza. An Inquest into its Martyrdom (University of California Press, 2018).
The caged-in population of Gaza, the great majority of whom are refugees and their descendants from the 1948 mass dispossession and expulsion of Palestinians from Israel, has grown to two and a half million in a strip of land roughly the size of Detroit. After each previous round of pulverization, partial reconstruction is financed from sources in the Arab world, notably Qatar, and some international agencies.
Hamas itself attempted to reconcile its ideological opposition to Israel’s existence with the hard facts of its governmental responsibilities. Its political wing in particular signaled willingness to live with some kind of two-state solution, if that was the will of the Palestinian people. Israel’s leadership, of any political bloc, showed no interest. Crumbs of aid and opening a handful of jobs in Israel for desperate Gaza workers would assure what Israel cynically called “quiet for quiet.”
So pleased were Israeli authorities with the stability of the status quo that they confidently moved military units to serve and protect fanatical West Bank settlers while they raid and pillage Palestinian villages, burn fields and uproot priceless olive trees. Towns in southern Israel were left barely guarded. But before October 7, what could go wrong?
FACING BRUTAL FACTS
It is necessary to face hard facts of October 7 and the aftermath. The extraordinary organization, secret preparation, complexity and sheer power of the Hamas attack truly shocked the world.
So did the extreme brutality of the mass murders that it committed. Unless there was a breakdown of command and control, it would appear that the raid’s principal purpose was to kill people — even more than taking captives to exchange for more than six thousand Palestinian prisoners (including 360 children) held in Israel, many under “administrative detention” orders without charges or trial.
Claims that some Israeli citizens may have been killed in the army’s assaults to regain control, for example, “A growing number of reports indicate Israeli forces responsible for Israeli civilian and military deaths following October 7 attack” are unverified, but wouldn’t be unprecedented in Israel’s history of dealing with hostage crises.
Nonetheless, large-scale murders on October 7 by Hamas militants are extensively documented in body-cam and cell phone footage as well as survivors’ accounts. It included indiscriminate butchery of families in their homes — and of many civilians who could have been captured but instead were gunned down.
The extent of the killing beyond any evident strategic goal marks this as a hideous action, nothing to do with advancing Palestinian resistance or any progressive purpose.
It displays even more appalling indifference to the incineration it would bring down on the civilian Gaza population. In what way would this “advance” the struggle?
The moral and political crimes of Hamas include its failure to carry out construction of civilian bomb shelters and emergency supplies in the face of repeated rounds of Israeli air and ground assault.
Supporters of Palestinian freedom need to face what this says about the real nature of Hamas, as well as the way it has ruled in Gaza. Recognizing the absolutely essential right of oppressed peoples to resist, including with arms, does not absolve us of the responsibility to analyze the methods and politics of the forces acting in their name.
The criminality is all the greater if, as some analysts suggest, a purpose of the Hamas attack was deliberately to draw Israel into a ground invasion. Could the organization’s military or political leadership have imagined that regional state powers would come to its rescue?
Inevitably, as always the enormous power of Israel’s military machine with full U.S. support rapidly dwarfed the 1400 Israeli deaths on October 7. These were easily doubled by Palestinian lives lost in just the first few days of Israel’s retaliatory bombing and the “total siege” that Netanyahu promised would “wipe out” Hamas, “change Gaza forever” and “reverberate for generations.” At this writing, Gaza’s Health Ministry estimates that the death toll among Palestinians numbers over 8,000.
This was before a ground invasion of Gaza, before hospitals lost the last of their generator fuel, and before Israel bombed people who followed its orders to flee south — and for what purpose on the Israeli side?
After Israel’s enabling the rise of the forces that became Hamas, can it now be “eliminated” without a mass slaughter of at least tens of thousands of Gaza civilians and the forced removal of probably hundreds of thousands more? Where would they supposedly go?
Who if anyone would rebuild Gaza this time? Will a “smaller Gaza with fewer people,” as an Israeli government minister promises, re-create Israeli delusions of security? Does Israel intend to reoccupy the place or turn it over to a totally discredited PA, a pathetic client of the Occupation?
There are press pundits promoting all these obscene scenarios and more, all based on perpetuating Israel’s apartheid-colonial control.
THE RESPONSES
Amidst worldwide outcry for an immediate ceasefire, the State Department prohibited its officers from the very mention of the term. Beyond “standing with Israel” and rushing more weaponry that it doesn’t even need to destroy Gaza many times over, the U.S. plan seems to consist of pursuing Israeli-Saudi “normalization” over the smoking ruins of Israel’s war on Palestine.
Joe Biden stated the truism that “Hamas does not represent the Palestinian people…” Indeed, what polling is available indicates that Hamas may be supported by around 20% of Gaza’s population, maybe much less.
(Jim Zogby of the Arab American Institute estimates more like 11%. See also Amaney A. Jamal and Michael Robbins, “What Palestinians Really Think of Hamas,” Foreign Affairs, October 25, 2023. This new poll was completed just before Oct. 7 when the Israel-Gaza war broke out. A few of many results: Both Hamas and Fatah have the support no more than 30% and much less by most measures.)
But such U.S. pronouncements hardly square with statements by Israel’s state president Herzog that “Gaza is Hamas,” or Benjamin Netanyahu at the United Nations displaying a flag showing Greater Israel including Gaza and the West Bank. That’s the real-life result that Biden’s pledge of massive new military assistance for Israel will provide.
Meanwhile the new catastrophe has revealed, and deepened, the polarization in the U.S. Jewish community over Israel and Palestine. During the week of October 16 in actions on a scale never seen before, Jewish Voice for Peace, If Not Now and other Jewish-led solidarity organizations shut down exits from the White House on Monday and swarmed Capitol Hill on Wednesday, demanding an immediate cease-fire. The JVP-led October 27 mass sit-in shut down New York Grand Central Station with over 400 arrests.
But a typical establishment response was penned in the Detroit Free Press (Sunday, October 16) by Rabbi Asher Lopatin, who has an undeserved reputation as a moderate and conciliating voice:
“Hamas’ wholesale targeting and murder of families babies, children, mothers and grandmothers — was the worst one-day catastrophe for our people since the Holocaust. And it brought back memories of the pogroms in Eastern Europe before and after the Russian Revolution, when Jews were attacked and killed in brutal raids. But this time even more extreme, like the brutality practiced by ISIS, but this time ISIS is here for the Jews.”
Some historical context is missing here, to say the least! Jewish communities targeted by pogroms in Europe, let alone in the Nazi genocide, were not only defenseless but even more important, had nothing to do with creating the conditions that led to their murder.
The Israeli victims of the Hamas attack, certainly innocent in themselves, were citizens of the grotesquely self-described “nation-state of the Jewish people” – a state that not only claimed to be defending them, but produced the conditions for their murder and helped set in motion the force that perpetrated the October 7 massacre.
Comparisons of Hamas with ISIS, like Netanyahu’s pronouncement that “Hamas is ISIS” (and Biden’s blather that “these guys make al-Qaeda look pure”), provides a cover for war without limit or restraint, while West Bank settler atrocities escalate by the day. It’s more accurate to see Hamas and the Israeli occupation as asymmetric, but symbiotic, death-spiral dance partners.
One can say that the Israeli government and Hamas, each for their own reasons, wanted the current war, and the United States is either unwilling or incompetent to stop it. On the other hand, none of the state actors want the apocalypse of a regional war — not Israel, not Saudi Arabia or Iran, certainly not Lebanon which would be annihilated, and not the USA.
If, however, states and/or their client forces blindly stagger into a regional war, then no one knows where it will lead or how much the gates of hell might swallow.
Demanding an immediate cease-fire for Gaza has become the global movement’s central driving priority. The spreading outrage around the world, along with the growing protest among U.S. Palestinians, Arabs, progressive sectors of the Jewish community and other allies in solidarity, are the best hope right now for blocking the road to genocide.
October 30, 2023
Source: November-December 2023, ATC 227.
Oppose Israel’s repression and war! Solidarity with Palestinians!
DECLARATION BY A GROUP OF REVOLUTIONARY COMMUNISTS IN CHINA
SATURDAY 18 NOVEMBER 2023, BY COLLECTIVE
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The year of 2023 has seen an escalation of the conflict between Israel and Palestine. Israel has continuously engaged in conflicts with Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, leading to a full-scale war on October 7, 2023. This war, initiated by Israel, has resulted in brutal and inhumane actions against civilians, causing over ten thousand deaths in the Gaza Strip. We strongly condemn Israel’s war against the Palestinian people and stand in solidarity with them.
While the direct trigger for this war was Hamas’ armed attacks on Israel, the root causes lie in the British colonial period, which fostered Zionist movements to suppress anti-colonial movements among Palestinians. Subsequently, since Israel’s establishment in 1948, continuous oppression of the Palestinian people has been evident. Israel has established settlements throughout Palestine, displaced Arab residents, targeted Palestinian resistance (even peaceful ones), launched wars against Palestine, and implemented policies of racial segregation. These measures have forced many Palestinians to leave their homes, resulting in the displacement of a significant portion of the Palestinian population to other countries. Israel’s policies of racial segregation have led to massive poverty and hindered economic and social progress in Palestine. The prolonged oppression has led to armed resistance by the Palestinian people. We support the Palestinian people in their struggle against Israel’s settler colonialism and racist regime.
However, supporting the Palestinian people’s resistance against Israel does not mean endorsing Hamas. We oppose Israel and Western imperialist governments’ use of "terrorism" to attack Hamas. Nevertheless, we recognize Hamas as an ultra-right-wing obscurantist organisation that promotes corrupt, anti-working class and gender-oppressive policies in Gaza. While they actively resist Israel’s invasion, their indiscriminate attacks on Israeli civilians and adherence to Islamic fundamentalism hinder the cause of Palestinian liberation. We also do not support the Palestinian Liberation Organization (Fatah), as the Fatah regime, accepting the Oslo Accords, has become a puppet regime fostered by Israel in Palestine, extending a "peaceful" hand to Israel while wielding an oppressive fist against the Palestinian people.
Imperialist governments such as the United States, France, the United Kingdom, and Germany hypocritically claim "humanitarianism" while steadfastly endorsing Israel’s colonial rule. They shift the main responsibility for this war onto the shoulder of Palestine and Hamas, allowing Israel’s unrestricted bombing of Gaza, making them among the main creators of the humanitarian crisis in Palestine. Their involvement in Palestine aims to maintain their imperialist hegemony in the Middle East. They now restrict their own countries’ freedom and democratic rights under the guise of "opposing anti-Semitism" to support Israel. China and Russia ostensibly support Palestine, not wanting the Middle East to be entirely controlled by Western imperialism, which could affect their regional hegemonic expansion. However, under monopolistic capitalist systems, China no longer supports Palestinian liberation. By recognizing the 1967 borders between Israel and Palestine, the Chinese government essentially acknowledges Israel’s colonisation of Palestine as legitimate. As long as colonisation and occupation continue, there can be no lasting peace in Palestine. Therefore, China’s proposed "peace between Israel and Palestine" is immensely hypocritical, aiming for regional stability to better export capital to Palestine and other Middle Eastern countries and develop capitalist economic and trade relations with Israel. Hence, relying on any imperialist power will not achieve the liberation of the Palestinian people or bring peace to Palestine. The struggle of the Palestinian people must reject and oppose any reliance on imperialist forces. Additionally, we support movements worldwide opposing Israel and advocating for the Palestinian people, aligning with struggles defending and asserting countries’ freedom and democratic rights, fighting against racism, and promoting the workers’ anti-war movement.
Many reactionary forces, including conservative liberals in China, praise Israel as a representative of civilization and peace, using Islamophobia to label Palestinian Arabs as "terrorists." This is a complete distortion. Zionism sacrifices the interests of indigenous Palestinians to establish a racist Jewish state of settlers. While many Chinese nationalists superficially support Palestine, they are, in essence, aligning with the geopolitical interests of China and Russia. Some even espouse anti-Semitism, sympathising with Hitler’s extermination of Jews. Oppression should never justify creating more oppression. We oppose all forms of racism, not just against specific races and ethnicities.
For over seventy years, the Palestinian people have suffered from Israeli oppression backed by world imperialism. However, this time, we have witnessed Arabian ruling classes’ betrayal of the Palestinian people: the Egyptian government collaborating with Israel to construct walls around Gaza, Syria and Jordan suppressing Palestinian refugees and dissenters, Iran primarily concerned with fostering Hamas to expand its influence in Palestine, and Lebanon suppressing leftist organisations among Palestinian refugees. Relying solely on local Palestinian efforts is insufficient to end Israel’s colonialism and apartheid. The Palestinian people need support from mass movements in the Middle East and across the world. The wave of revolt against reactionary forces in West Asia and North Africa, as well as the Iranian theocracy, will pave the way for the autonomous resistance of the Palestinian people. The cause of Palestine’s liberation is the cause of the working class and the oppressed people around the world.
The workers’ struggles in the Middle East, together with the Palestinian refugees residing in various countries, often intertwines. Such resistance shall by no means choose sides among different imperialist or regional powers, but rely on struggles waged by working class self-organisation independently with the end of the collective defeat of all imperialist powers. Various self-organised grassroot committees in the Syrian revolution, people’s representative assemblies in Algeria’s popular movement, labour movements in Tunisia, feminist protests and workers’ strikes in Iran, the Sudanese Professional Association representing the struggle of the working class against military dictatorship in Sudan, all of them serve as a necessary starting point for future struggles that will eventually dismantle the power of bourgeois states in the Middle East, end the basis for Israel’s Zionism, and facilitate the establishment of a multi-ethnic, equal, democratic, secular and socialist Palestine, encompassing Arabs, Jews and others. To achieve the Palestinian liberation and prevent the fruits of struggle from being exploited by reactionary forces such as the Muslim Brotherhood or Hamas, we argue for the establishment of revolutionary labour parties in the region and beyond.
We hereby propose the following demands:
End the Zionist rule of Israel!
Down with colonialism and racism!
Oppose imperialist forces’ interference in Palestine!
From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!
Strive for the establishment of a secular, ethnically equal, democratic and socialist Palestinian state!
Workers and people in West Asia and North Africa unite!
15 November 2023
P.S.
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ATTACHED DOCUMENTS
Extraction PDF [->article8317]
Palestine
Catastrophe in Palestine and Israel: Apartheid on the Road to Genocide
West Bank: faced with attacks by the Israeli army and settlers, fear, despair and anger among Palestinians
The war in Gaza and the Germany’s “raison d’état”
Netanyahu will have to pay the price for hubris
Ukrainian Letter of Solidarity with Palestinian people
FRIDAY 10 NOVEMBER 2023, BY THÉO S
Version imprimable
The massacres of the Palestinian people in Gaza are unspeakable, but the news from the West Bank is equally terrifying. Towns, villages and refugee camps cordoned off day and night; daily arrests and killings; threats; constant attacks and expulsion of the inhabitants from their villages by the Israeli army and the settlers.
Friends in Beit Jala/Bethlehem and in the Dheisheh refugee camp confirm this dramatic situation for the Palestinians. Beit Jala, near Bethlehem, a mainly Christian town with a population of 12,000, is located 10 kilometres from Jerusalem. Tens of thousands of Palestinians left Beit Jala for Chile after 1948, and since then they have continued to go into exile to escape the constant threats from the Zionist state. There is talk of 100,000 people from the Beit Jala/Bethlehem region being exiled or descended in Chile and the Americas. Spanish is spoken by many people in these towns. The houses abandoned by the exiles have taken in refugees from the Nakba.
TEN KILOMETRES FROM JERUSALEM
The town and refugee camp are surrounded by settlements, and the wall of hatred and shame built by Israel cuts through, encircles and imprisons the Occupied Palestinian Territory. Since the wall was built, people have had to spend hours at checkpoints to get from Bethlehem to Jerusalem, 10 km away. Today, Palestinians have nowhere to go. They are prisoners of a permanent state of siege.
The images they were able to send us confirm the state of occupation and siege: threatening settlers, villagers violently chased from their fields at olive harvest time; deserted streets crossed by overarmed Israeli soldiers; Palestinians violently arrested at dawn, hands and feet tied, blindfolded...
Michel*, who lives in Beit Jala, talks to us about all the army checkpoints in the town and tells us that horrible things happen everywhere in the Bethlehem region, especially in the villages and near the settlements.
EXILE? WHERE TO?
Hassan* lives with his wife and their three very young children in Dheisheh. Stuck in their small flat. They have not been able to see the rest of the family for several weeks. Armed soldiers and settlers, settler leaflets ordering Palestinians to leave for Jordan, three people murdered in a fortnight, including a 16-year-old boy. We see the lifeless body, the blood, the funeral...
When asked about work, he replies that there is "simply no more" and that it’s not easy to manage to provide for his family.
The Zionist and colonial state is waging an all-out war in Gaza. It is also attacking all Palestinians. The situation in the West Bank is equally serious. Fear, despair and anger are palpable in our exchanges. Our friends are asking the question: "Should we also leave, as the settlers and the Zionist state want us to, before it’s too late. But where should we go?
They would still like to believe in international solidarity and keep a little hope alive. It’s our duty to demonstrate our solidarity en masse, to put pressure on our government to say: "Stop this situation". That’s the least we owe the Palestinian people.
11 November 2023
Translated by International Viewpoint from l’Anticapitaliste.
*First names have been changed.
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