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No 1635 2nd November 2023

From the river to the sea?? That’s the aim of imperialist Zionism, genocidally ethnically cleansing an indigenous people from their own lands, lived on for nearly two millennia, for “Greater Israel” ends and to serve US imperialist domination needs. But every part of the artificial “Israel” project, which the Palestine revolt resists, is nothing but a colonialist landtheft monstrosity. It can never be “free to live in peace” without completing destruction, expulsion or subjugation of 8 million local Arabs, mostly already driven into persecuted refugeehood, as well as constantly smashing down the whole Arab world around it and the whole Middle East too. Hence the demented “kill them all” barbarous frenzy whipped up by cynical and luridly exaggerated moralising about terrorism, and Jerusalem’s self-righteous butter-wouldn’t-melt pretences of innocent “justification” for genocide. NO “right to self-defence” can be claimed for a stolen country on stolen lands. Nor are there “civilians” in such a brutally imposed “state”; directly or tacitly, all are a permanent army of occupation, imposing non-stop apartheid oppression. Zionist claims that an end to “Israel” is anti-Jewish is a self-righteous LIE to “justify” its own barbarous butchery and feed the “anti-semitism” hysteria used for three decades to censor and suppress all anti-imperialist and especially communist struggles. No threat to Jewish lives is involved. Let the Jewish occupiers go back home to the US, Russia, Europe etc (where they came from, mostly in living memory) – or remain under reinstated Palestinian rule in a unitary state. Western backing meanwhile is not just support for its Zionist “allies” but a desperate effort to step up faltering Third World War plans, imperialism’s only solution to economic and political Catastrophe. All wars failing from Iraq to Ukraine but crisis collapse can only worsen, and war will not stop until Leninist revolution is built to overturn capitalism everywhere.

The explosive guerrilla war outburst from Gaza’s trapped and imprisoned Palestinians against the Zionist occupation of their country continues to send shock waves in all directions, shattering imperialism’s confidence as its international crisis contradictions relentlessly deepen.

Not just the Zionist rottweilers for the imperialist system in the Middle East but the entire bourgeoisie, to the very centre of the Empire in Washington have been poleaxed by this astounding eruption of resistance and rebellion, still continuing despite the genocidal and fascist “collective punishment” imposed yet again by the terrorising rule of the post-WW2 Jewish occupation.

They all understand its significance as a blow against the entire rotten imperialist order, which is inspiring and stirring up the masses of ordinary people in every recess of the exploited world.

If this is the advance in fighting capacity of just one tiny part of the persecuted and exploited billions whose bloodsucked labour and resources sustain the whole stinkingly rich and ever more unequal imperialist order, then what happens when the hatred and hostility felt by the billions in the entire tyrannised “global south” teaches them to fight too??

And what happens when they get past the crudities, reactionary puritanism and confusions of Islamic terrorism or “militant left reformist nationalism” (in Latin America eg or Russian-speaking Ukraine) which have filled the vacuum left by 90 years of revisionist retreat, and find their way to a full mass revolutionary consciousness, led by scientific Leninist understanding of the need for class war to overthrow the whole bankrupt capitalist order?

No wonder the whole of crisis-wracked imperialism has pitched in behind this genocide, sending money, arms and two gigantic naval fleets to help impose its fascist aggression.

It is killing tens of thousands and terrorising the whole region in its attempt to smash down and destroy the upheaval and revolt of these downtrodden people.

But it will not work, anymore than the US and NATO butchery of millions already in Serbia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Syria or in the fascist Ukrainian proxy war against Russia has “worked” to stabilise imperialist world control.

As Marxism explains, the world’s population has been steadily transformed by historical progress and the non-stop spread and intensification of monopoly capitalist production, unavoidably and necessarily turning them into a sophisticated and modernised proletariat for its factories and plantations, but thereby creating a world population which can only find the hire-and-fire wage slavery of the profit system, its grotesquely unfair inequality and ruthless exploitation, all increasingly intolerable.

It becomes ever more so as the unstoppable monopoly capitalist slump Catastrophe intensifies into ever worsening trade war conflict and all-out antagonism (see Marx, Lenin etc (box) and past issues EPSR eg 1631).

Riots, revolts, civil war, and rebellion are erupting everywhere.

The masses have already been fighting back in explosive Latin American struggles and street rebellion; anti-Western “gang” revolt in Haïti: demonstrations and mass strikes in Pakistan, India, the Philippines and the rest of Asia; in multiple anarcho-terrorist uprisings, labelled “jihadism” and “terrorism”, across the Middle East and Africa’s Sahel all the way to Morocco; as well as in mass street-filling upheavals like the Arab Spring; and in civil/national liberation wars like the Houthis in Yemen, all “condemned” and damned by hypocritical imperialist moralising world rule as “unacceptable violence and barbarity” but brutally suppressed in fact because they dare challenge the imperialist domination and exploitation maintained by the real worldwide terror and violence of capitalism itself which makes an unendingly blighted slave or near-slave misery of their lives.

Their revolt will only deepen relentlessly however crudely made at first and however many times it is thrown back.

None express this more clearly than the particular plight of the Palestinians, at the very core of world imperialist oppression, and subject to its most disgusting, vile and concentrated expression in the 80-year long colonial intrusion of the Jewish apartheid “state” into their heartland, stealing their homes, their towns, their farms, their development and their nation to insert a dagger into the centre of the Middle East, for both Zionist fanatical settler colonial purposes and to serve the domination needs of imperialism.

Just two decades ago the Second Intifada was erupting in a far more limited way, using individual self-sacrificing suicide bombs and street attacks on the hated oppression occupying their country, forcing back the Zionist dominance, though eventually itself pushed back down again, isolated by high walls and bludgeoned into the floor with smiting blitzkrieg, terror bomb blasts, body-shredding shellings and white-phosphorus bone-burning munitions (seen again this time), wholesale murdering raids like the massacring destruction in Jenin’s refugee camps, and half a dozen outright terror-massacre blitzkriegs on Gaza, accompanied by throttling siege isolation of the near concentration camp of the Gaza strip for 18 years, keeping its jammed-in population festering in appalling unsanitary living conditions with near-universal, routinely terrorised, deprivation, unemployment, poverty, and humiliation.

Meanwhile the remaining Palestinian population on the West Bank was (and is) subjected to non-stop terror, and repression, sabotage and murderous intimidation by the “illegal” (for what such bourgeois terms are worth) settlers’ programme, by the official military occupation which backs them up with its brute force and arbitrary violence and, sickest of all, by their own corrupt and bought-up bourgeois stooge Palestinian Authority, working with both the Zionist and CIA backers who fund and train its “security forces”).

But even in the teeth of relentless racist intimidation and daily harassment, constant technological and bribed informer spy surveillance, bullying violence, assassinations, house demolitions, kidnappings, nighttime arrests and torture, – (including of the most brutal kind at the Zionists’ own secret Guantánamo-type prison, the hidden Facility 1391 - see EPSR No 1210) – the militancy of the people, for the moment under the leadership of Hamas embedded in the mass population, has climbed to a new level of organisation, military capability, and social organisation.

The result has been a blow delivered against the Zionist oppression, and the world ruling class funding it and backing it politically and militarily, that has sent the whole filthy fascist international capitalist order into a frenzy of fear and panic, driving it to unleash this degenerate and barbaric collective mass murder of civilians.

Such defeats for imperialism are crucial developments as the world is plunged into the greatest ever collapse in history, and is being deliberately set on a path into WW3 as a “solution” by its bourgeois rulers – a war now running for at least two decades since Serbia was blitzed.

And there is no point declaring it to be “invalid” because of its “terrorist methods” (deliberately and luridly exaggerated and to some extent even fabricated by the cynical Zionist propaganda machine anyway) as if there were some gentlemanly Queensbury rules for a national liberation struggle and some “deserved”(!!) “penalty” for infringing them, involving total genocide.

It is the reality of the world order created by imperialism and its violent domination of the planet.

It is the only way this downtrodden mass of people has been able to fight, given few choices by the tyranny which holds them down unlike the oppressing occupation which has chosen to keep its boots (and $bn of US funded tanks, artillery and jet fighter bombers) on the neck, or rather in the face, of this people for eight decades and more.

All the moralising is saying one thing only – there is no right to fight back against the non-stop-violence of capitalist domination, (as ultimately so too are the “ceasefire” demands from dismayed liberalism and the exposed opportunists of the “labour movement”, which declare “stop fighting and we will let you live” – in the same unchanged humiliation and oppression as before).

Of course there remain limitations, and even reactionary backwardness, in the Hamas (and Islamic Jihad) leadership’s religious ideology, but its self-sacrificing determination and willingness to fight against the permanent suppression and humiliation of an entire people has won it respect across the whole planet, save in the nastiest and most degenerate sectors of imperialism and notably its Anglo-Saxon sections:

On Tuesday, widespread condemnation of Israel rippled across the region after a huge explosion at a hospital in the Gaza Strip killed hundreds of Palestinians who had been seeking treatment and refuge. Israel has denied being behind the blast, blaming a Palestinian group, Islamic Jihad, for a failed rocket launch.

But even before that, many people across the region had come to view Israel’s war with Hamas — the Palestinian armed group that carried out a shocking attack on southern Israel more than a week ago, slaughtering 1,400 people — as an American-backed massacre of Palestinian civilians in the blockaded territory of Gaza.

Israel has cut off water, medicine and electricity in the enclave and continued to target Gaza with deadly airstrikes, bringing the death toll to at least 2,800 before the hospital explosion.

Many Arabs view the American government as not only being indifferent to the agony of Palestinians living under Israeli occupation, but also complicit in it. American pledges of “ironclad” support for the country — and no-strings-attached security assistance — have stoked those feelings as Israel prepares for a ground invasion of Gaza.

“There is tremendous anger in the Arab world, even by those who do not support Hamas,” said Nabil Fahmy, a former foreign minister of Egypt. “They are giving Israel a green light,” he said of Western powers, “and as this gets increasingly bloody, the West will have blood on its hands.”

So intense is the anger that a refrain, “Death to America,” has found renewed resonance in the region, including during a protest on Friday in Bahrain, a close American ally.

Many Palestinians and other Arabs said in interviews that the rhetoric coming from senior Israeli and American officials had been dehumanizing and warmongering.

When the war began, Mr. Biden called the attacks by Hamas — in which gunmen killed Israeli soldiers and civilians and took nearly 200 people hostage — “pure, unadulterated evil.”

The Israeli defense minister, Yoav Gallant, said: “We are fighting human animals. There will be no Hamas; we will eliminate everything.”

As he traveled around the region over the past week, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken signaled that the Biden administration would have a high tolerance for whatever resulted from Israel’s military response to the Hamas attacks.

Diana Buttu, a Palestinian citizen of Israel who has worked as a lawyer on Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, said she had never harbored “any illusions” about the U.S. role in the conflict, knowing that America firmly backed Israel. Even so, she said, she was stunned by the Biden administration’s response.

“It’s like somebody has ripped out my guts,” she said. “This level of siding with Israel is genocidal.”

In the broader Middle East, many people do not view Israel as the victim of an unprovoked terrorist attack — as some American officials have described it — but as a colonial-style occupier that has been buttressed by the United States and that has oppressed the Palestinians for decades.

Khalid Al-Dakhil, a prominent Saudi public intellectual, said that what frustrated him the most was Western powers’ “blind adoption of the Israeli narrative of events.”

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At a massive pro-Palestinian rally in Istanbul, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Israel was an occupier in its war in Gaza, and repeated his stance about Hamas not being a terrorist organisation.

“I reiterate that Hamas is not a terrorist organisation. Israel was very offended by this … Israel is an occupier, Erdogan speaks clearly because Turkey does not owe you anything,” he told hundreds of thousands of supporters on Saturday.

People gathered at Istanbul’s Ataturk airport for a rally organised by Turkey’s governing AK Party to protest against Israel’s continued bombardment of the Gaza Strip and call for a ceasefire.

Demonstrators chanted pro-Palestinian slogans and waved Turkish and Palestinian flags at the event dubbed the “Great Palestine Meeting” on Saturday, as Israel pushed forward with its “expanded” ground operation amid a near-total communications blackout in the Gaza Strip.

The rally was attended by leaders of other political parties, as well as high-profile media and sports figures – some of whom were expected to take to the stage during the event, local media reported.

Erdogan told the crowd that Western powers were “the main culprit” behind the Israeli army’s “massacre” of Palestinians in Gaza.

“The main culprit behind the massacre unfolding in Gaza is the West,” said.

Al Jazeera’s Osama Bin Javaid, reporting from the rally, said this was “by far one of the strongest speeches that we’ve heard” from the president.

Protesters were seen wearing headbands with inscriptions such as “We are all Palestinians”, “End the genocide”, or “Be the voice of Palestinian children”.

Since Friday evening, Gaza’s 2.3 million residents have been largely cut off from all communications with each other, as well as with the outside world, as Israeli ground troops battle Hamas fighters inside the besieged enclave.

According to Palestinian health authorities, at least 7,703 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli bombardment since October 7, including about 3,000 children. More than 1,400 people were killed in the Hamas attack on Israel.

Former (Greek) finance minister Yanis Varoufakis has said that he and his party will never condemn Hamas’ attack on Israel.

“Those who try very hard to extract from people like me and DiEM25 a condemnation of the attack by the Hamas guerillas will never get it,” he said in an interview shown on X, formerly known as Twitter.

“And they will never get it for a very simple reason. Those who care about humans without any discrimination, those who care equally about a Jew and an Arab, must ask themselves a very simple question: what exactly is their idea of the cessation of hostilities? That Palestinians are going to lay down their arms and go back into the largest open-air prison in the world where they are constantly suffocated by the apartheid state?”

Varoufakis compared Hamas to the ANC’s armed wing uMkhonto we Sizwe (MK), which also “killed innocent civilians.”

“Any human being living under apartheid at some point will either die a terrible silent death or rebel and take some innocent people with them.”

“The criminals here are not Hamas … The criminals are Europeans,” Varoufakis charged, “for keeping our mouths shut” while Palestinians were being killed and not Israelis.

While the comments appear to have been made on Saturday, the day of the Hamas attack, Varoufakis and his MeRA25 party shared them on Twitter on Monday.

By all means let better methods (which must mean more advanced Marxist-Leninist philosophy) be developed and fought for against decades of brain deadening revisionism, to lead the entire world proletariat in the huge conscious mass international class-war revolutionary struggles needed to overturn the whole of the imperialism (and this great upheaval underlines the need for Leninist theoretical struggle to get on with it).

But that revolutionary philosophical struggle can only really open up anyway as imperialism is pushed back in defeats and retreats.

It is suffering one.

However limited the philosophy of the national liberation struggle, it has shown an astonishing level of intelligence-led organisation, military coordination, secret planning and dogged resistance, which has sent the overwhelmingly powerful and well armed Zionist state and its forces into a stunned paralysis from which it will never recover.

No amount of horrific collective punishment blitzkrieg now rained down on the civilian masses of the Gaza strip in a gross infringement of every supposed “international justice” principle – (an exposure of the utter falsity of all this hypocritical “human rights” posturing from which the entire bourgeois world’s “democracy” and “freedom” hoodwinking racket will never recover either) – will disprove the vulnerability and beatability of the Zionist “defences” (adding to the humiliation of the 2006 retreat from the Lebanon border in the teeth of the then Hezbollah offensive).

In fact the Zionists’ barbaric “red mist” vengeful smiting of the upsurge, to try and restore its supremacy by brute force and outright terror, demonstrates its weakness and is only magnifying the disaster, as it exposes the degeneracy and vicious brutality of the Jewish apartheid domination on a wider scale and to a greater extent than ever, far beyond an already long history of massacres, ethnic cleansing and colonialist butchery from the very foundation of the “state”.

This deliberate and conscious genocide is of such depravity and inhumanity that it has poleaxed the entire planet, raising ten thousand questions in minds everywhere, particularly in the seething billions of the Global south but also deep into the population of the “advanced countries”.

The unprecedentedly full and open support of the Western imperialist world, backing up and arming this psychotic and demented fascism to the hilt as tens of thousands of innocents, families and children are starved, enthirsted, maimed, buried alive and blown to pieces, raises even more questions and exposes the fears of the entire imperialist order, as it contemplates the spread of revolt across the planet.

Zionism has been intertwined with the fate of all imperialism since its foundation and its defeat or overturn immediately has huge implications for all the Empire’s international domination.

Small wonder corrupt US president “Joe” Biden felt obliged the warn the Zionists to tread carefully (!!!) on his blundering Jerusalem intervention, knowing just how the US’ own disastrous invasions of the last 20 years have driven tens of thousands into the ranks of insurgent resistance and rebellion from Iraq and Afghanistan onwards.

It is too late.

The astonishing bravery, doggedness and resilience of this persecuted people, refusing to be cowed by the monstrous Nazi blitzkrieg onslaught unleashed against them has stirred the world’s masses and inflamed their already profound hatred and hostility for the imperialist system which dominates their lives too.

They grasp it viscerally because most of it is the daily reality of their own existence too, from Sri Lanka, the Philippines, and Yemen to the slums in Jakarta, Haïti, Lagos, Dakha and the Rio favelas etc, all ground down in the outright violence of imperialist police repression, gangsterism and mafia politics imposing savage exploitation and the non-stop slow violence of poverty, sweatshops, gross lack of sanitation, slum conditions, environmental poisoning, disease, alienation and deprivation.

The Nazism now unfolding is so filthy and inhuman – an act of historical degeneracy and of a proportion far beyond a mere “warcrime” or even a “crime against humanity” from the moment it cut off even basic water supply to 2.3million people, – at least a third just children – that it has not only hugely magnified the boiling hostility in the “Global south” but sent further sections of the Western petty bourgeoisie and intelligentsia reeling, (and some bourgeois too) with splits appearing at all levels from Washington itself, to the craven stoogery of the United Nations and all down through reactionary stooges like the Labour Party, the trade union bosses and most of the fake-“left”.

Giant demonstrations have erupted everywhere.

Typical reaction comes from the former diplomat turned left liberal Craig Murray:

Oct 13: The UK and the US are both sending military assistance to Israel to commit a calculated and deliberate act of genocide, which is already underway.

Over 500 children have been killed in Gaza in the last week and over 2,000 maimed, many with life changing injuries. Nobody can claim they do not know what is already happening or what is about to unfold. The cutting off of food and water to Gaza is a major international crime, which the western proponents of the “rules based order” universally refuse to condemn.

In both the UK and the US there can be no more stark illustration of the lack of any kind of meaningful democracy, than the fact that there is no major political party that opposes the genocide – despite massive public opposition.

The bought and paid for media and political class in the west are extremely nervous, throughout the western world. Now they have come to the final genocide for which Zionism has always aimed, they face a good deal of popular resistance.

Throughout Europe there is a massive gap between the Zionist unanimity of the politicians and the much greater understanding of the Palestinian situation among the general public. Tellingly the response by the Zionist political class has been a wave of outright fascist suppression.

In France, Macron has made all pro-Palestinian demonstrations illegal, but as so often the French people are not standing for that kind of authoritarianism.

In the UK, the police have adopted the cowardly tactic of arresting a couple of individuals, one in Brighton and one in Manchester, for pro-Palestinian demonstration. Under Tony Blair’s notorious draconian “anti-terror” legislation, they could face up to 14 years in prison.

The young man in Manchester was arrested on the precise site of the famous “Peterloo massacre”, which generations of British people were taught at school was a terrible crime in breach of the rights to freedom of speech and assembly. Let the irony of that set in.

You can go out in the streets of the UK with an Israeli flag and yell that you want every Palestinian to be cleansed from Gaza. That is not illegal. If you say the Palestinians have a right to resist their genocide, that is illegal.

That appears to be a genuine analysis of the law in the UK, France and many other western countries.

That is intended to terrify all of us. It will not work.

The European Commission has been ferociously zionist and gung-ho for this Palestinian genocide. It displayed the Israeli flag on its Berlaymont headquarters. It has taken a side in the most ferocious way.

It is therefore deeply sinister that the European Commission is actively working to shut down pro-Palestinian information and comment on social media.

 

Oct 23:Tonight has been the most violent bombardment of Gaza so far, notably concentrated on precisely the areas into which Israel ordered the population to evacuate. I find it almost impossible to believe that this genocide is under way with the active support of almost all western governments.

I want to look at two questions – what will happen internationally, and what is happening in western societies.

Israel plainly is on the course of further escalation and intends to kill many thousands more Palestinians. More than 2,000 Palestinian children alone have now been killed by Israeli aerial attack in the last fortnight.

Gaza has no defence from bombs and missiles, and there is no military reason why Israel cannot keep this up for months and simply rely upon aerial massacre. We are perhaps within a week of thirst, starvation and disease killing even more people per day than bombardment.

The population of Gaza are simply defenceless. Only international intervention can stop Israel from doing whatever it wishes, and those countries which have influence with Israel are actively abetting and encouraging the genocide.

The question is, what is Israel’s aim? Do they intend to reduce the Gaza Strip still further, annexing half or more of it? Will starvation and horror enable the international community to force Egypt to accept the expulsion of the population of Gaza into the Sinai Desert as a “humanitarian” move?

That appears to be the end game: expulsion of population and territorial expansion into Gaza. That would require a ground invasion, but probably not until after even more intense aerial bombardment to eliminate all resistance. This territorial ambition of course accords with the violent expansion of illegal settlement in the West Bank which is currently under way, with the world paying almost no attention. It is very hard indeed to comprehend the passivity of Fatah and Mahmoud Abbas at the moment.

Netanyahu’s political stock within Israel is so low, that the only way he can recover is by making a major step towards the complete genocide of the Palestinian people and the achievement of Greater Israel. Netanyahu now knows that there is no violence against Palestinians so extreme that the western political elite will not support it under the mantra of “Israel’s right to self-defence”.

I do not see any salvation for Gaza coming from Hezbollah. If Hezbollah were to employ their vaunted missile strike capabilities, the moment to do it would be now when the Israeli armour is drawn up in massive parks outside Gaza, a perfect target even for longer range missiles of limited accuracy. Once dispersed into Gaza the armour would be far harder for Hezbollah to hit at range.

Hezbollah is even better equipped now to fight a defensive war in Lebanon than it was when it defeated the Israeli advance in 2006. But it is not configured or equipped to fight an aggressive ground war into Israel, which would be a disaster. It also has to worry about hostile militias in its rear. If Hezbollah can provoke an Israeli incursion into Southern Lebanon, that would enable it to inflict substantial casualties, but Israel is not going to do that in a way that detracts from its capabilities in Gaza.[...]

Whether immediate “salvation” appears from Iran etc or that too itself is pushed down by imperialist belligerence, it will not save either Zionism or Washington and its stooges long term.

Anger and hostility has spread everywhere by the horrors of the inhuman and degenerate collective “punishment” imposed on men, women and especially children, appalling the entire world and further exposing the degenerate fascist reality of bourgeois rule and its compliant petty bourgeois hangers-on.

Murray’s outrage is excellent (and echoed throughout the world) and has already earned him prosecution by a vicious Tory establishment.

But he needs to grasp that all this “democracy”, “free speech”, “human rights” and “international law” has only ever been a gigantic lie anyway, a hoodwinking racket devised over several centuries by the ruling class to hide its ruthless dictatorship, aided by the paid-off corruption of the petty bourgeoisie and the class-collaborating layers of better off workers (TUC, Labourism) to mislead and confuse the working class, heading it away from the revolutionary understanding without which capitalist tyranny will just continue non-stop.

Post-war manifestations of the democracy fraud in a United Nations of “world justice”, Geneva conventions and “war crime” courts are now exposed completely by the gross hypocrisy of an “international community” which has nothing to say to stop these horrors and call this Zionist monstrosity to account, even as it itself shouts “war crimes” non-stop at the Russians, and the war they have been provoked into by NATO and the Kievite fascists in Ukraine.

Could hypocrisy get more gross and cynical??

Such is the power of anti-communist brainwashing over more than a century that battles to “defend democracy” may well spontaneously emerge as illusions are crushed and the ruling class turns up its censorship, and intensifies repression of anyone speaking out against the “kill them all” atmosphere deliberately whipped up as the “only solution” for “unacceptable terrorism” (all of a piece with total domestic repression against any attempts to speak out for the Palestinians and part of general open police-state savagery being imposed).

But if they do, they need to understand that nasty nazism of the likes of Suella Braverman is no joke; the bourgeoisie is increasingly and seriously turning to fascism, whether or not it is kitted out in shiny jackboots.

There will be no return to “democracy” within bourgeois society this side of World War Three, however wide a mass struggle can be mobilised.

Only establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat can change anything and end the slide into World War Three.

Every kind of reformism, revisionism and fake-“leftism” still clinging to “No to war” social-pacifism and even-handed “condemnation of violence” is dangerously misleading the working class and anti-capitalist movement as the treatment of the pro-Palestine marches is already making clear.

Huge as they are, they face a monstrous campaign of censorship, Zionist vilification, government denigration and media intimidation in Britain, Europe and McCarthyite America:

The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) has warned of the “continued criminalisation of advocacy for Palestinian rights” and described an “increasing tide of anti-Palestinian and anti-Arab attacks in the US” following the Hamas cross-border attack in which about 1,400 Israelis were killed and more than 200 abducted.

Palestine Legal, a Chicago-based civil rights group, said it has received hundreds of requests for legal assistance from people who have lost their jobs, been threatened with dismissal or faced other sanctions for speaking out in support of Palestinians.

Some of the more high-profile instances include executives at Wall Street financial firms pledging to blacklist students who sign statements in support of Palestinians.

The editor of the scientific journal eLife, Michael Eisen, was forced out of his job after reposting an article from the satirical magazine the Onion challenging the view that people should not criticise Israeli actions unless they first condemn Hamas. The Onion headline read: “Dying Gazans Criticized for Not Using Last Words to Condemn Hamas”.

Hundreds of academics signed an open letter saying the dismissal was an offence to free speech.

Paddy Cosgrave, the chief executive of a major global technology conference, was forced to resign as head of his own company after leading tech firms, including Meta, Google, Intel and Amazon, pulled out of the annual Web Summit gathering in Lisbon next month after he posted on X (formerly Twitter): “War crimes are war crimes even when committed by allies, and should be called out for what they are.”

A leading Hollywood talent agent, Maha Dakhil, whose clients include Tom Cruise, Natalie Portman and Reese Witherspoon, was removed from her company’s board after sharing an Instagram post accusing Israel of genocide in Gaza.

Dakhil apologised for reposting “hurtful language” and said she was “grateful to Jewish friends and colleagues who pointed out the implications and further educated me”.

In New York, the 92NY arts centre called off a series of book talks after several writers withdrew in solidarity with an author whose reading was cancelled because he criticised Israel.

A New York museum, El Museo del Barrio, rejected an artwork commissioned for its annual Day of the Dead celebrations because it included a Palestinian flag and called off a fundraiser at which the piece was to be unveiled.

Hundreds of lawyers and legal organisations have signed an open letter calling on the US authorities to protect the rights of Americans to criticise Israel’s assault on Gaza.

“Elected officials have irresponsibly accused protesters for Palestinian rights of antisemitism and support for terrorism, and called for the mobilization of law enforcement resources to police them, contributing to racist fear-mongering. This portends a dangerous reignition of ‘war on terror’ policies that led to extreme state repression and constitutional rights violations against Arab, Muslim and other communities of color,” the letter says.

On Friday, the US Senate unanimously passed a resolution condemning “anti-Israel, pro-Hamas student groups” after demonstrations on university campuses, some of which included antisemitic language and chants praising the Hamas attack. But many others have been in solidarity with Palestinian civilians under Israeli bombardment in Gaza.

“While the Senate seems overly preoccupied with what students are saying, they’re deafeningly silent about genocidal statements from those in positions of power: Israel’s defense minister’s dehumanizing reference to Palestinians as ‘human animals’, the threats from an Israeli major general of total destruction, Senator Lindsey Graham’s callous statement that Israel should ‘level the place’ and Representative Max Miller’s outrageous demand for Gaza to be transformed into a parking lot with its inhabitants displaced.”

As the same reporter makes clear, in another (shortened) piece, the bullying media and political pressure in the US has a particular propaganda intent to make the genocidal butchery of Palestinian civilians disappear:

Aziz Abu Sarah knows what it’s like to have been so entrenched in his views that to give an inch, even to acknowledge someone else’s suffering, feels like a betrayal. And now the who works to get American Muslims and Jews listening to each other’s perspectives, is seeing the problem all around.

“I have friends who are American Jews and friends who are Arab American and they both only feel the pain of one side and completely ignore the other. Even some people who are not directly connected to either side have decided to be hardcore for one side or the other,” he said.

Each side in the latest round of Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the Middle East is pushing its narrative hard in America.

Well-funded pro-Israel groups are working to keep the focus on the 1,400 Israelis killed and more than 200 abducted by Hamas in its cross-border attack three weeks ago. Electronic billboards with the faces of the Israeli dead and disappeared are patrolling the streets of New York and other cities.

Groups such as the American Jewish Committee are also seeking to discredit discussion of the broader context of occupation and oppression, (emphasis added) including the ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in the West Bank, as amounting to justification of the Hamas attack. They paint the escalating Israeli bombing of Gaza as a necessary and reasonable response even as the numbers of Palestinian civilians killed runs into the thousands.

The AJC was among those saying it was “shocked” by the UN secretary general António Guterres’s statement that the attack “did not happen in a vacuum” and that the “Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation”.

On the other hand, some supporters of the Palestinians celebrated the cross-border raid as a legitimate act of resistance against Israel while downplaying or denying the brutal slaying of civilians, including children.

The Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari and the celebrated Israeli novelist David Grossman were among those who criticised American and European progressives, decrying “extreme moral insensitivity and political recklessness” for placing all the responsibility for the Hamas attack on Israel without condemning the killings and, in some cases, even justifying them.

Many other Palestinian Americans and their allies have shied away from talking about the attack at all for fear that acknowledgement of wrongdoing would be interpreted as endorsing the Israeli military assault on Gaza.

The result is that Americans on both camps have not only struggled to acknowledge the suffering on the other side but also to admit wrongdoing by their own.

Abu Sarah Palestinian peace activist, said he confronted entrenched views in trying to talk about a woman abducted by Hamas and people killed in the Israeli bombing of Gaza.

Abu Sarah, who grew up in the West Bank, travelled his own path from throwing stones at Israeli soldiers and seeing his brother die from internal injuries the family said were the result of torture while detained without trial in an Israeli prison.

“When I was in high school and there were suicide bombings, there were kids that would say, ‘I’m also for resistance, even armed resistance, but suicide bombing isn’t armed resistance, it’s killing kids, it’s killing women, and we shouldn’t be doing that.’ And then others would say, ‘No, we have the right to do whatever we can,’” he said.

“Growing up, I had this way of thinking. If I sympathise at all with anything Israeli, with anything Jewish, then I’m accepting this whole occupation. It took me a long time to come to understand I can be sympathetic, I can understand the pain, I can speak against our own violence and at the same time speak out against the occupation and speak out against Israeli violence. Those are not mutually exclusive.”

He said he has no problem condemning the Hamas attack but understands why others hesitate.

Some Palestinian Americans say they are subject to a double standard in being asked to condemn Hamas before being permitted to talk about the bombing of Gaza. They say Jewish Americans are not expected to jump through the same hoops in condemning occupation before being heard about the deaths of Israelis.

Discussion is not helped by a barrage of misinformation and propaganda. Abu Sarah said he spends a lot of time pushing back against false claims including a video on social media that supposedly showed one member of Hamas telling another to rape a woman during the 7 October attack.

“I’m listening in Arabic and that’s not what he said. I’m not denying that we might have seen similar things happening but that’s not what he says. So I sent my friend a message saying that this is just not true. Their response was, ‘Well, I’m sure something like this happened so it doesn’t matter if it’s true,’” he said.

Obviously the death of any human being, gruesome or not, is a desperate tragedy all around, but there is at least a double misrepresentation in all of this (and a long following section) typical of handwringing academic petty bourgeois liberalism.

First is the equating of the Palestinian cause with the Zionist occupation, and the pious vicar-ism of “us all admitting to wrong on both sides”.

It is a stinking falsehood to declare the Palestinian struggle against national oppression to have any kind of parity with the Zionists’ violent repression, either in the sheer physical scale of the massacring, or the justification for it.

The Palestinian victims of an 80 year long torment and agony have 100% right to fight on their side with what pathetically few resources they can muster; the Zionists none at all except the stinking “right” of overwhelming brutal “might” imposed by the third largest military force in the world, and bristling with hi-tech supplied by the US or developed themselves (subsidised with decades of huge annual dollar payments from Washington).

Secondly, there is no parallel status between the blasted apart civilians in Gaza and the Zionist population, which has no civilians at all, however heartwrenchingly their stories are presented in non-stop media accounts, especially as children or pensioners, because “Israel” is a permanently armed colonialist occupation in which every single inhabitant (bar those excluded by apartheid citizenship rules) is directly or tacitly part of the military or state (or will become so by late teenage) repressing a dispossessed people.

The former UN arms inspector and US marine Scott Ritter, who called out the WMD lies that “justified” the Iraq war and the fascist reality of the Kiev Ukrainian war, gives a good part explanation of how the entire village and kibbutz structure of “ Israel” has this war purpose as this exert explains:

When Yaakov was part of the Zionist Youth Movement, he would travel throughout the Negev on foot, familiarizing himself with the Arab villages, and learning their Hebrew names as they existed in the Bible. Next to Yaakov’s hilltop settlement, which became the Hatzerim Kibbutz, was an Arab village named Abu Yahiya. One of the missions given the Kibbutzniks of Hatzerim was to collect intelligence on the local Arabs that would be used by Israeli military planners who were at the time preparing for the large-scale expulsion of the Arabs from the Negev.

The Arabs of Abu Yahiya provided Yaakov and his fellow Zionists with fresh water and would often guard the property of the Kibbutz while the men were away on work. There was an understanding between the leaders of Abu Yahia and the Hatzerim Kibbutz that they would be allowed to remain once Israel took control of the Negev. Instead, when war came, the Kibbutzniks from Hatzerim turned on their Arab neighbors, killing them and driving the survivors away from their homes forever.

Most of the survivors ended up living in Gaza.

The slaughter and physical eradication of the village of Abu Yahiya, the town of Bersheeba, and the 245 other Arab towns and villages in the Negev by Israeli settlers and soldiers has gone down in history as the Nakba, or “Catastrophe.” The Palestinians, when speaking of the Nakba, do not only address the events of 1948, but everything that has transpired since then in the name of the post-1948 sustainment, expansion, and defense of Zionism that defines modern-day Israel. Israelis do not talk about the Nakba, instead referring to the events of 1948 as their “War of Independence.”

“Silence on the Nakba,” one contemporary scholar on the subject has observed, “is also part of everyday life in Israel.”

After the establishment of the Jewish state of Israel in 1948, a group of Jewish settlers approached Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, requesting that the men from their settlements be allowed to serve in the military as a group. The result was the creation of the Nahal program, which combined military service with agricultural work. The Nahal forces would form a garrison, which would then be transformed into a Kibbutz, which would serve as the first line of defense against any future Arab attack on Israel. In 1951, the very first of these Nahal settlements, Nahlayim Mul Aza, was established on the border with the Gaza Strip. More followed, as the Nahal project sought to surround Gaza with these fortress-settlements. In 1953, Nahlayim Mul Aza made its transition from a military outpost to civilian Kibbutz and was renamed Nahal Oz.

One of the first settlers in Nahal Oz was a man named Roi Ruttenberg. At the age of 13, he served as a messenger boy during the 1948 War of Independence. When he turned 18, in 1953, he enlisted in the IDF, and then went on to get his commission. His first job as an officer was to serve as the security officer for Nahal Oz. He was married, and in 1956 was the proud father of an infant son. On April 18, 1956, Roi was ambushed by Arabs, who killed him and took his body into Gaza. His body was returned after the UN intervened, and he was buried the next day, on April 19. Roi’s death had enraged the Israeli nation, and thousands gathered for his funeral service.

Moshe Dyan, the Israeli Chef of Staff, was in attendance, and delivered a eulogy which has gone down in Israeli history as one of the defining speeches of the nation. “Early yesterday morning,” Dyan began, his voice carrying over the crowd of mourners, “Roi was murdered. The quiet of the spring morning dazzled him and he did not see those waiting in ambush for him, at the edge of the furrow.”

[...] The speech is notable for its open recognition of the hatred of Israel on the part of the Palestinians imprisoned in Gaza, as well as the source of their hatred, and understanding regarding the legitimacy of the Palestinian emotions.

But it is also unapologetic about the righteousness of the Israeli cause, regardless of the legitimacy of the Palestinian cause. Israel, Dyan said, cannot be settled without the “steel helmet and canon’s maw.” War, he said, was Israel’s “life choice,” and as such Israel was condemned to a life of militarized diligence, “lest the sword be stricken from our fist and our lives cut down.”

As people reflect on the violence which took place on October 7, when hundreds of heavily armed Hamas fighters surged out of Gaza and fell upon the military outposts and Kibbutzes that surrounded Gaza, they should never forget the origins and purpose of these installations—to literally pen the population of Gaza into what is in effect an open-air concentration camp, and the emotions produced amongst the Arab population imprisoned there. The Israelis who lived, worked and served in these encampments bore “the heavy gates of Gaza” on their shoulders, laboring under the “burning hatred” of a people forced to sit in refugee camps while, before their eyes, the settlers in the surrounding Kibbutzes transformed “the lands and the villages where they and their fathers dwelt” into the Israeli Jewish homeland.

These Israelis all grasped the sword of Zionism firmly in their hands. None among the adults who lived and worked in these encampments can be considered innocent—they were part of a system—Zionism—whose very existence and sustainment demand the brutal imprisonment and subjugation of millions of Palestinians who had their homes stolen from them 75 years ago. They lived out their “fate,” as Moshe Dyan called it, with all its inherent brutality. The “heavy gates of Gaza” was the destiny of their generation, until, like Roi Ruttenberg before them, the gates weighed too heavily of their shoulders and overcame them.

As made clear in the previous cutting, the American Jewish propaganda line is to play up a story of “innocent” Zionist “civilians” peacefully minding their own business until “shockingly attacked” by “maniac” islamists, (who “have no interest in their own people”) leaving Jerusalem “no choice” but to “deal with the threat”.

Attention is forcefully directed to the latest attack with all attempts to look deeper and into prior causes cynically and deliberately batted away.

The biggest item sent into the long grass is the glaring question in the centre all of this, the very nature of “Israel” and its foundation in the first place.

As the EPSR has explained in multiple articles (see EPSR Book Volume 20 Occupied Palestine and the conspiracy/fraud of “left anti-semitism” (accusations)) this fundamental question is always hidden – in fact made a complete taboo to raise – because to answer it would expose all the moralising posturing and “justifications” for the imperialist butchery now and over the last 80 years.

Not for nothing do the Western politicians begin every statement by solemnly intoning that “Israel has the right to defend itself” on the one hand and that the terrorist methods of the Gaza militants are “beyond the pale”, “inhuman”, unacceptable, “barbaric” and just “crimes against innocent civilians”.

All this is then dutifully and nightly repeated by every outlet of the venal and disgusting stooge media, freshly transferred from 18 months of pumping out the foulest of demonising anti-Russian lies from the nazi-NATO and fascist Kiev pysops machine in Ukraine (and still continuing in fact) even as the reporters shift guiltily on their heels with every “objectively observed” high explosive bomb blast and childish body pulled from beneath yet another collapsed apartment block while po-facedly maintaining the risible pretence of “even handed” reporting, “impartial interview” and repetition of the demonising “atrocity” hysteria.

But that “self-defence” could only be true if “Israel” were a real country with the “right to exist”.

It is not and to say so is total garbage.

And as soon as the history of its foundation, in bloody terror and ethnic cleansing just one long lifetime ago, is properly spelled out, the whole stinking nonsense becomes clear.

No wonder it never gets talked about.

By what right allegedly does “Israel” have the right to exist?

To answer that makes a mockery of all the sanctimonious “righteousness” because there is only one answer; only through the “right” of sheer bloody terror and terrorising warmongering.

“Israel” was founded by the dispossession of the indigenous mostly Arab people of Palestine in 1947 and 1948, courtesy of an imperialist consensus through the stooge United Nations and its capitulation (out of imperialist guilt at the genocidal horrors capitalism had imposed through its Nazi war instrument in Germany) to the violent ethnic cleansing of the territory by several thousand outright terror-thug Zionists, notably in the Irgun and Stern gangs.

A people who had lived there for at least 1500 and more likely 2000 years (far longer than most modern nations, such as the mongrel English finally coalesced around the time of Chaucer from Celts, Angels, Saxons, Danes, Norsemen and some French), were terrorised and driven from their villages, and towns, farms and olive groves by the hundred thousand, with their property taken over by Jewish immigrants or often razed completely to a few overgrown stones, wiping out the very memory of whole communities.

They have been able to watch their land cultivated and tilled or built over ever since, from behind the high fences of the Gaza strip where most of them were forced to go.

Contrary to another bourgeois lie that the Hamas fight has “set back the Palestinian cause by 70 years”, it has actually forced this question to the surface.

Even some small corners of the bourgeois press have been driven to go over some of this history, albeit still maintaining a the usual “neutral tone”:

[..]starting point for many people is the United Nations’ vote in 1947 to partition land in the British mandate of Palestine into two states – one Jewish, one Arab – following the destruction of much of European Jewry in the Holocaust.

Neither the Palestinians nor the neighbouring Arab countries accepted the founding of modern Israel. Fighting between Jewish armed groups, some of which the British regarded as terrorist organisations, and Palestinians escalated until the armies of Egypt, Iraq, Transjordan and Syria invaded after Israel declared independence in May 1948.

With Israel’s new army gaining ground, an armistice agreement in 1949 saw new de facto borders that gave the fledgling Jewish state considerably more territory than it was awarded under the UN partition plan.

What happened to the Palestinians who were living there?

About 700,000 Palestinians were expelled or fled – about 85% of the Arab population of the territory captured by Israel – and were never allowed to return.

Palestinians called the exodus and eradication of much of their society inside Israel the Nakba, or “catastrophe”, and it remains the traumatic event at the heart of their modern history.

Arabs who remained in Israel as citizens were subject to official discrimination. They were placed under military rule for nearly two decades, which deprived them of many basic civil rights. Much of their land was expropriated and Arab Israeli communities were deliberately kept poor and underfunded.

What is the Palestine Liberation Organisation?

In 1964, a coalition of Palestinian groups founded the Palestine Liberation Organisation under the leadership of Yasser Arafat to pursue armed struggle and establish an Arab state in place of Israel. The PLO drew international attention to its cause with high-profile attacks and hijackings.

How did the occupied Palestinian territories become occupied?

In 1967, Israel launched what it said was a pre-emptive defensive war against Jordan, Egypt and Syria, as they appeared to be preparing to invade. The attack caught Arab governments by surprise and saw Israel achieve rapid victories including seizing the Sinai peninsula and the Gaza Strip from Egypt, the Golan Heights from Syria, and the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan. The six-day war was a spectacular military success for Israel. Its capture of all of Jerusalem and newly acquired control over the biblical lands called Judea and Samaria in Israel opened the way to the construction of Jewish settlements in the West Bank, which became central to the conflict.

Israel placed the Arab population of the West Bank under military rule, which is enforced to this day.

When did Hamas enter the picture?

The PLO was a generally secular organisation modelled on other leftwing guerrilla movements of the time, although most of its supporters were Muslim.

Islamist groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood had previously avoided armed conflict and were largely dedicated to working for a more religious society. But that position shifted under the leadership of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, a charismatic quadriplegic living in Gaza who helped found several Islamist organisations in Gaza including Mujama al-Islamiya, which won support by establishing a network of social services including schools, clinics and a library.

Shortly after the outbreak of the first intifada, Yassin used support for Mujama al-Islamiya as the foundation for the formation of Hamas in 1987 in alliance with other Islamists.

Israel has always denied encouraging the rise of the Islamist movement in Gaza but it saw the groups as a way of undermining support for the PLO and recognised Mujama al-Islamiya as a charity, allowing it to operate freely and build support. Israel also approved the creation of the Islamic University of Gaza, which became a breeding ground of support for Hamas.

What was the first intifada?

Israel regarded the Palestinian population under its control as largely quiescent even as it went on expanding Jewish settlements in Gaza and the West Bank and expropriating Arab land. Palestinians were also treated as a cheap source of largely manual labour inside Israel.

That illusion was shattered in 1987 as young Palestinians rose up. The uprising was marked by mass stone throwing. The Israeli army responded with large-scale arrests and collective punishments.

The intifada is largely recognised as a success for the Palestinians, helping to solidify their identity independently of neighbouring Arab states and forcing Israel into negotiations.

It also strengthened Arafat’s hand to make compromises with Israel, including adopting the principle of a two-state solution.

Whatever happened to the peace process?

As the first intifada wound down in 1993, the Oslo peace process started with secret talks between Israel and the PLO. Israel’s then prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, signed an agreement with Arafat aimed at fulfilling the “right of the Palestinian people to self-determination” although Rabin did not accept the principle of a Palestinian state.

The Oslo accords established the Palestinian National Authority, granting limited self-governance over patches of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Further negotiations were intended to resolve issues such as the status of Jerusalem, the future of the Israeli settlements and the right of return for the millions of Palestinians still classified as refugees after their forebears were never permitted to return to their homes.

Some prominent Palestinians regarded the accords as a form of surrender while rightwing Israelis opposed giving up settlements or territory.

Among Israelis, the political charge against Oslo was led by future prime ministers Ariel Sharon and Benjamin Netanyahu, who fronted rallies at which Rabin was portrayed as a Nazi. Rabin’s widow blamed the two men for her husband’s assassination by an ultranationalist Israeli in 1995.

What caused the second intifada?

Peace negotiations sputtered along until the failure of Bill Clinton’s attempts to broker a final deal at Camp David in 2000, which contributed to the outbreak of the second intifada. The uprising was markedly different from the first intifada because of widespread suicide bombings against Israeli civilians launched by Hamas and other groups, and the scale of Israeli military retaliation.

By the time the uprising ended in 2005, more than 3,000 Palestinians and 1,000 Israelis were dead.

The political ramifications of the intifada were significant. It led to a hardening of attitudes among ordinary Israelis and the construction of the West Bank barrier. But it also prompted then prime minister Ariel Sharon to say that Israel could not go on occupying the Palestinians’ territory – although he did not say that the alternative was an independent Palestinian state.

Is Gaza still occupied?

One consequence of the second intifada was Sharon’s decision to “disengage” from the Palestinians beginning in 2005 with the closing of Israeli settlements in Gaza and parts of the northern West Bank. It is not clear how much further Sharon would have gone with this policy as he had a stroke and went into a coma the following year.

The status of Gaza since the disengagement remains disputed. Israel says it is no longer occupied. The United Nations says otherwise because of Israel’s continued control of airspace and territorial waters, and also access into the territory, along with Egypt. Israeli has also blockaded the enclave since Hamas came to power in 2006.

In addition, many Palestinians in Gaza do not see themselves as a separate entity from the rest of their territories in the West Bank and East Jerusalem and so argue that as a whole they remain occupied.

Why does Hamas control Gaza?

Hamas won the 2006 Palestinian legislative elections in part because of a backlash against the corruption and political stagnation of the ruling Fatah party. The Hamas leader Ismail Haniya was appointed prime minister. Israel began arresting Hamas members of the Palestinian parliament and imposed sanctions against Gaza.

Deteriorating relations between Hamas and Fatah resulted in violence. An agreement to form a national unity government fell apart and Hamas led an armed takeover of Gaza while Fatah continued to control the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. There have been no elections since.

Hamas has continued to attack Israel from Gaza, mostly using rockets until the latest ground incursion. Israel has maintained a tight blockade of the territory which has contributed to deteriorating living conditions and deepening poverty.

Where are we now?

Although western governments still pay lip service to a two-state solution, there has been no progress toward an agreement under Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who has repeatedly said he will never accept a Palestinian state.

What this does not spell out is the always total unworkability of the “two state” solution anyway, demanding the Palestinians make do with just 22% of their own lands, and in fact far less in the light of Zionism’s endless occupation and non-stop West Bank settler seizures.

As the EPSR has said:

The potentially key story of the week was the deepening civil-war crisis engulfing the Palestinian nation where the arch-compromiser Arafat, who appears willing to cut a deal with American and Zionist imperialism whereby the Palestinians PERMANENTLY lose “only” 80% of their country to genocidal ethnic-cleansing and 50% of their people to PERMANENT formal refugee status (the other half remaining informal refugees locked into tiny Zionist-policed reservations in Gaza and the West Bank — the so-called “two-state solution”), — is facing more personal humiliation than ever and his ‘authority’ over Palestinians is collapsing more obviously than ever.

As this civil war intensifies, these Arafat ‘authority’ forces could melt away completely, — and with them the whole daft history of the impossible “two-state” compromise.

Either the Zionist imperialist colonial invasion from the West after 1948 DOMINATES the WHOLE of Palestine for ever; or every bit of this monstrous imperialist genocidal ethnic-cleansing outrage gets reversed.

There is no possibility of a “middle way” and never has been.

At some stage in any peaceful future world, the WHOLE of Palestine must revert to a single unitary territorial entity, and any religiously-driven Jewish settlers who want to remain on genuinely not-confiscated ground or ground that returning Arabs do not want to claim back, will have to take their chances as Jewish Palestinians. The days of Israeli Arabs are strictly numbered.

The Stalinist-Revisionist liquidation of the world communist movement has meant that temporarily, it is the Islamic fundamentalists who are providing the most effective revolutionary anti-imperialism. It is for the Marxist-Leninist tendency in world revolutionary philosophy to get its act together if any serious objections of “a better way” to the suicide-bomb tactics are to get a hearing.

In the meantime, these heroic anarcho-individualist developments of the religious/nationalist camp have achieved an astonishing self-sacrificing triumph in putting the all-conquering Zionist military aggressiveness on the back foot for the first time since 1945. (EPSR 1220 17-04-02).

To underline the point, such land as they would get from this always contemptuous “deal” is the very worst scraps of rocky arid semi-desert, far more difficult to “make bloom” than that which Zionism either bought out, or mostly seized by force.

And the non-stop sabotage, harassment and intimidation by the on-the-make aggressively fascist Greater Israel settler immigrants from Russia, Europe and mostly America – “illegal” but fully backed up by the government – makes sure even that is not going to happen:

In their uncle’s house, next door to the ruins of their demolished home, two young boys from Aqbat Jaber refugee camp in the occupied West Bank were still asleep at midmorning.

A few nights ago, their own bedroom was blown up during an Israel Defence Forces (IDF) operation in the camp on the outskirts of Jericho: it was targeted because the boys’ father, Maher Shalon, has been arrested on suspicion of killing an Israeli settler. A 17-year-old Palestinian was killed during the raid on Friday, six people injured, and two arrested.

After the family home was destroyed, the boys’ mother took their older brother to Bethlehem for medical treatment. The younger children are now being cared for by their uncle, Mansour, and their paternal grandmother, Hamda. According to them, the boys have not gone outside since.

“The Israelis are coming almost every day since 7 October,” said Mansour, 56, referring to the date the Palestinian militant group Hamas broke out of the besieged Gaza Strip, massacring 1,400 Israelis and sparking a new war in which more than 5,700 Palestinians in the coastal exclave have been killed.

Aqabat Jaber is one of the 19 camps still scattered across the West Bank, set up in the aftermath of the creation of Israel in 1948, to house people fleeing what Palestinians call the Nakba, or catastrophe. Today, the camps are still slum-like mazes of narrow streets with few services, plagued by poverty and crime. They are all also centres of armed resistance to the Israeli occupation.

The Aqbat Jaber raid on Friday was just one of several major Israeli operations in West Bank refugee camps and cities over the past two weeks – a signal that Israel also considers the territory fair game in its new war with Hamas in Gaza, and of how increasing military activity is liable to set the already unstable West Bank alight too.

More than 90 people have been killed, mostly in altercations with the IDF, and 1,200 Palestinians have been arrested by Israeli forces in the West Bank since the conflict broke out, according to Palestinian data.

At least eight Palestinian communities have also been forced to leave their land in the face of escalating violence from settlers, Israelis who live in the West Bank. In Wadi as-Seeq, near Ramallah, soldiers and settlers detained three Palestinians, stripping them to their underwear before beating them, urinating on them, extinguishing cigarettes on them, and sexually assaulting them. The IDF has opened an investigation.

The entire territory – home to 3 million Palestinians, and about 500,000 Israelis – feels like it is on the verge of an explosion. On Tuesday, Aqbat Jaber was uneasy; outside the entrance to Jericho, cars and trucks snaked back for about a kilometre in each direction in hours-long waits at checkpoints. Next to one of the makeshift concrete booths, a young Palestinian man was sitting on the ground, hands tied behind his back and blindfolded, as he waited in the desert sun for the soldiers to inspect his vehicle.

The two-storey Shalon house now lies in ruins, the surrounding date trees covered in rubble dust. During the demolition, Mansour said, soldiers had entered his neighbouring home too, removing all the windows, for what they said was the family’s safety. Two rooms of Mansour’s house were also damaged.

At the family home of 22-year-old Mahmoud Hamdan, killed by an Israeli sniper after being caught unawares by a raid while on his way to work, his parents Tahani and Mohammed, like everyone else in the region, were glued to the news. The Jordanian channel they were watching did not censor or edit its material from Gaza: there was no respite from footage of dead children being carried from ambulances and laid in body bags.

“I feel the pain of all mothers since Mahmoud was killed. I know the Israelis could come back any time and kill the rest of my children,” said Tahani, 44, as she tried to hold back tears.

Before the decades-old Israeli-Palestinian conflict roared back to life on the Gaza front earlier this month, most people in the region had been more worried about the possibility of a return to full-scale fighting in the West Bank. 2022 was the bloodiest year in the occupied territory since the close of the second intifada, or Palestinian uprising, in 2005, and 2023 had surpassed the previous year’s grim statistics even before the new war erupted.

Hamas maintains active cells across the West Bank, and some measure of popular support – the Islamist group has stoked the violence here too. But a new generation of fighters, mainly concentrated in Nablus and Jenin, are only loosely affiliated with the established factions such as Hamas and their secular rivals, Fatah.

The rising tide of violence is putting pressure on Fatah, which dominates the West Bank’s semi-autonomous Palestinian Authority (PA), and is widely viewed as undemocratic and corrupt after 16 years without elections. Mahmoud Abbas, the PA president, is 88, but has refused to appoint a successor; the territory faces a serious power vacuum when he leaves, or dies, in office.

The PA is also deeply unpopular because it cooperates with Israel on security matters, and it has already lost control of several camps across the West Bank to militias in the last year or two. PA security forces have put down protests against the war in Gaza with teargas and rubber bullets, further adding to the idea that it no longer represents the Palestinian people.

“The PA acts like it is with the Israelis,” said a 19-year-old getting his hair cut at a barbershop in Aqabat Jaber. He refused to give his name, citing security concerns. “It is very obvious why my generation has no hope in an endless occupation, and thinks the militias have the answer.”

The PA has been almost completely sidelined in international mediation and de-escalation efforts.

Dozens have been killed in the villages and towns this year and more among the rural herders:

This week the Bedouin community packed up most of their belongings and drove all the women, children and elderly people from the West Bank ridge they had called home for nearly four decades, perched above a spring and beside an archaeological site.

“They didn’t leave us air to breathe,” said Zawahri, 52, describing a months-long campaign of violence and intimidation that intensified in the last two weeks. First villagers were barred from grazing lands, and the spring, then violence reached their homes in the Bedouin village of Ein Rashash

“They came into the village and destroyed houses and sheep pens, beat an 85-year-old man, scared our children. Slowly our lives became unlivable.”

A few men are trying to stay on amid the shells of homes, empty animal pens, smashed solar panels and broken windows, staking a fragile claim to their own village.

This was not an individual tragedy. Men from Angels of Peace are part of a broad, violent and very successful political project to expand Israeli control of the West Bank that has accelerated, say activists, since the 7 October attacks by Hamas launched a war with Israel.

The unlikely agents of this land grab are sheep and goats, herded by radical settlers on small outposts.

Taking land by building homes and communities on it is slow and expensive. Taking control of large swathes of dry hills needed to feed a herd of animals, by intimidating and isolating Palestinian shepherds and bringing in another herd, is much more efficient.

Over the last year alone, 110,000 dunams, or 110 sq km (42 sq miles), was effectively annexed by settlers on herding outposts. All the built-up settlement areas constructed since 1967 cover only 80 sq km.

It was also the biggest displacement of Palestinian Bedouins since 1972, when at least 5,000 – and perhaps as many as 20,000 – people were moved from the northern Sinai to make way for settlements, Shaul added.

About 450,000 Israelis have settled in what is now Area C of the West Bank – the area under full Israeli military and political control – since the occupation of the Palestinian territories began in 1967, some motivated by religious or nationalistic reasons, and others by the cheaper cost of living.

Their presence is viewed by most of the international community as a major obstacle to lasting peace, but until recently most focus has been on communities of houses rather than herder outposts.

In September, the UN warned about rising settler violence targeting Palestinian herders and driving them from their homes and land.

“A total of 1,105 people from 28 communities – about 12% of their population – have been displaced from their places of residence since 2022, citing settler violence and the prevention of access to grazing land by settlers as the primary reason,” the United Nations office for the coordination of humanitarian affairs (OCHA) said.

Now with the Israeli military preparing for a ground invasion of Gaza, diplomats concerned about rescuing hostages in Gaza and averting regional war, and a national mood of fury after the massacre of 1,400 people on 7 October, there is little focus on the West Bank.

In a climate of fear for Palestinians – the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem said soldiers and settlers have killed 62 Palestinians over 10 days – the displacement of herders has sped up, say activists.

The Guardian visited two villages abandoned in less than a week, Ein Rashash and Wadi a-Seeq, and a third where some families were discussing leaving.

“This was already the most significant displacement we’ve seen since the 1970s. Now you have seen two villages abandoned in one week,” Shaul said. “This is on steroids.”

Herder settlers living near the village of al-Mu’arrajat had begun stopping Palestinians, asking for their IDs and telling them they had 24 hours to leave their homes, said Alia Mlehat, 27.

Israeli herder settlers had taken control of 10% of Area C and 6% of the entire West Bank in about five years, Shaul said, citing figures compiled by Kerem Navot, an NGO that tracks settler activity.

The denial of grazing access adds economic warfare to physical violence. Cutting off land for grazing and growing fodder forces herders to sell off some animals, and with smaller flocks, they make less money and are more vulnerable to sickness, injury or other loss.

The impact was so serious, it may amount to a war crime, the statement added. Along with demolitions, evictions and restrictions on movement and construction, the attacks on herders created “a coercive environment that contributes to displacement that may amount to forcible transfer, a grave breach of the Fourth Geneva convention”.

In the most extreme cases, villagers are so frightened of travelling on roads controlled by settlers that Israeli activists from groups that try to protect Bedouin communities – living with them, walking with them as they herd flocks and documenting abuses – are bringing them food and water.

They too sometimes become targets. Hagar Gefen, 71, was beaten so violently last year that she ended up in hospital with broken ribs and a punctured lung.

For many communities the displacement is a second upheaval driven by the Israeli state and its citizens. Al-Zawahri’s family were forced out of the Negev area in 1948, and wandered for several years before settling in their current homes.

Giant demonstrations supporting the Palestinians across the world reflect growing dismay at the imperialist crisis Catastrophe and its slide into brute war but are still hamstrung by a complete lack of revolutionary leadership.

“No to war” pacifism, revisionist condemnations of “jihadism” (including pro-Putinism) and slippery “ceasefire” opportunism by some Labour MPs (who all backed Keir Starmer’s vicious reactionary Zionism until seeing which way public opinion was blowing), all needs exposing, as actively blocking Leninist perspectives and the world revolution needed to end this vile system.

Don Hoskins

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