In this Issue:

• The Urgent Need Right Now – by Daniel Gluckstein

• Renowned Israeli Journalist Gideon Levy Denounces Israel’s War Crimes

• “Bloodshed Traces Back Directly to U.S. Complicity in Israel’s Occupation”

• Message from Larry Goldbetter, President of the National Writers Union

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The Urgent Need Right Now

By Daniel Gluckstein

[Editorial in October 11, 2023 issue of  La Tribune des Travailleurs (Workers Tribune, Issue No. 410)

Hour after hour, the media revise upwards the number of civilian victims – particularly young people and children – who have lost their lives since October 7, on both the Israeli and Palestinian sides. Sadly, this toll is set to rise in the coming days if, as announced, the Gaza Strip is crushed under a carpet of bombs, faced with a ground military intervention and its population starved as a result of the merciless blockade imposed by Netanyahu. To which should be added the thousands of children killed by the Israeli army over the last few decades.

No supporter of democratic rights, no humanist can remain impassive when faced with the death of a single innocent child, whether Jewish or Arab. But invoking this legitimate and shared emotion is not enough to open the path to a solution.

By responding to the Hamas attack with a deluge of metal and fire against 2 million Palestinians trapped in an open-air prison, Netanyahu is simply continuing what he has been doing for years: denying the existence of a Palestinian people who are demanding the legitimate rights to which all peoples aspire. This denial – and the spiral of repression and settler colonization that it entails – largely contributed to the attack on 7 October. To say this is not to deny Hamas’s responsibility for its actions, nor to approve of its policies. But it is not Hamas that Israel has been ignoring for decades, it is the Palestinian people as a whole.

It is true that you can temporarily condemn a people to silence. But you cannot make them disappear, even through terror. Legitimate national claims always resurface in the end. The Israeli journalist Gideon Levy says nothing else in the columns of [daily newspaper] Haaretz, which we quote in this issue of our newspaper. [See article below.]

Workers will remember that in 1954, when the Algerian people rose up for their liberation, the French government declared that it was not a question of a war of liberation, but of “terrorist acts”, to which it would respond with “police measures”. Later, Interior Minister Mitterrand declared: “The only negotiation is war”. The outcome is well known: 1.5 million dead on the Algerian side, but in the end, the legitimate cause prevailed against the colonial power.

One may or may not agree with the terms of the statement by the Democratic Independent Workers’ Party (POID) and the perspective it advocates of a single democratic and secular state guaranteeing equal rights to all its citizens. But whether one agrees or not, one indisputable fact remains: allowing Netanyahu to continue tomorrow what he did yesterday will undoubtedly result in thousands, perhaps tens of thousands more deaths, mostly civilians and children, but it will not be enough to wipe out the Palestinian people and their legitimate aspirations.

Nothing can justify the massacre in the Gaza Strip. The urgent need right now is to prevent it and to impose the lifting of the blockade.

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Order your copy today of “The Hidden History of Zionism,” by Ralph Schoenman

To order, go to: http://takingaimarchives.com/hhz/index.htm . Contact The Organizer if you want to receive a hard copy of the book ($25 donation to Socialist Organizer)

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Gaza:“ It is not possible to imprison two million people without paying a heavy price.”

Renowned Israeli Journalist Gideon Levy Denounces Israel’s War Crimes

(excerpted from the October 9 issue of the Middle East Monitor)

Renowned Israeli journalist Gideon Levy stated in an Opinion piece published in the daily Haaretz newspaper (October 8) that Israel is behind everything that has happened, adding that the Israelis thought they were allowed to do anything and that they wouldn’t pay a price or be punished for it.

Levy went on to say:

“We arrest, kill, mistreat, rob, protect settlers committing massacres. … We shoot innocent people, gouge out their eyes and smash their faces, deport them, confiscate their lands, rob them, kidnap them from their beds, and carry out ethnic cleansing. We also continue the unreasonable siege. And everything will be fine.” …

“We thought we could arrogantly continue to reject any attempt at a political solution, simply because it was not convenient for us to engage in it, and everything would definitely continue like this forever. Once again, this proved not to be the case.

“Palestinians in Gaza have decided they are willing to pay anything for a glimpse of freedom.”

As a result of the Palestinian resistance’s attack on Israeli towns around the besieged Gaza Strip, Netanyahu has declared that Israel is at war and has threatened to punish Palestinians in Gaza. Levy, however, says this will achieve little. “However, Israel has been punishing Gaza since 1948, without stopping for a moment. 75 years of abuse, and the worst awaits it now.

“Threats to ‘flatten Gaza’ prove only one thing: that we have learned nothing. Arrogance is here to stay, even after Israel has once again paid a heavy price.”

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U.S. Complicity in the Horror Caused by Israel’s Military Occupation

By Marjorie Cone

(excerpts from article published in Truthout on October 11)

On October 7, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared war on the Palestinian people, especially those in Gaza. Israeli warplanes are conducting indiscriminate bombings throughout Gaza, targeting homes, schools, hospitals, mosques and civilian buildings. As of October 10, Israel had reportedly used 1,000 tons of explosives and targeted 500 locations, primarily in civilian residential areas.

“The quantity of injured people arriving at our hospitals is huge and will mean we will not be able to accept more patients in Gaza,” Ashraf Al-Qidra, spokesperson for the Gaza Ministry of Health, told PBS. “All those who have been displaced don’t have anything. All they have is suffering, fear and horror,” Ahmed Youssef Mekhimar, a resident of Gaza, said.

Shames Ouda told PBS, “This power station served all Gaza Strip, and now is turned off, Gaza without fuel, without electricity, without Internet, without food. Gaza dying. The people will pay the price of this war.”

A full-scale Israeli ground offensive on Gaza is reportedly imminent, with 360,000 Israeli Occupying Force reserve troops poised to invade. In 2014, Israeli forces bombed and invaded Gaza, killing 2,251 Palestinians, most of them civilians, in “Operation Protective Edge.”

Netanyahu warned Gazans to “leave now” as Israeli forces would “act with all force.” But the people in Gaza cannot leave. Except for one border crossing with Egypt, Israel controls all ingress and egress into the Gaza Strip. As of October 11, Israel has bombed the Egyptian border crossing twice, and Egypt has refused to allow refugees through.

In the face of the tragic deaths of Palestinian and Israeli civilians, President Joe Biden issued a statement saying the United States “unequivocally condemns this appalling assault against Israel by Hamas terrorists from Gaza,” and pledged “all appropriate means of support” to Netanyahu. He did not decry the loss of Palestinian lives.

Biden called Hamas’s attack “pure, unadulterated evil” in an October 10 news conference. But he refused to urge Israel to exercise restraint in its retaliation against the Palestinians.

U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said in a statement that U.S. Navy vessels, including an aircraft carrier and a guided missile cruiser, had been sent to the Eastern Mediterranean.

“What is happening in Gaza is complete and utter extermination of the non-Jewish population in occupied Palestine,” Refaat Alareer, a Palestinian academic and writer based in Gaza City, told Democracy Now! “We are dealing with a systematic, structural, colonial attempt to annihilate and exterminate the Palestinians, with the aid and support of the West and American tax money.”

Israel has imposed a “complete siege” on the Gaza Strip. Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant declared, “No electricity, no food, no water, no gas — it’s all closed,” adding that “we are fighting animals and are acting accordingly.” Using starvation as a weapon of war constitutes a war crime.

“The root cause of Hamas’s attack was the cruelty of a half-century of abusive occupation by Israel that violated the most basic human rights of the Palestinian people, and relied on Apartheid practices of governance, according to reports by the leading human rights organizations in the U.S. and Israel,” Richard Falk, former UN Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in the Palestinian Territories Occupied Since 1967, told Truthout.

“The bloodshed of today and the past 75 years traces back directly to U.S. complicity in the oppression and horror caused by Israel’s military occupation,” Jewish Voice for Peace said in an October 7 statement titled “The Root of Violence is Oppression.” Jewish Voice for Peace blamed the U.S. government which “consistently enables Israeli violence and bears blame for this moment.

“The unchecked military funding, diplomatic cover, and billions of dollars of private money flowing from the U.S. enables and empowers Israel’s Apartheid regime.” Moreover, Jewish Voice for Peace noted, “Those who continue calling for ‘ironclad’ U.S. support for the Israeli military are only paving the path to more violence.”

The consequences of allowing Israel to continue and escalate its aggression against the Palestinian people are unimaginable.

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Message from Larry Goldbetter, President of the National Writers Union

On Wednesday [October 10] , I was on a zoom call with the Jewish Labor Committee about the recent horrific and escalating events in Israel and Gaza. The panel was chaired by RWDSU President Stuart Applebaum and AFT President Randi Weingarten. It included Peter Lerner, Director General International Relations at Histadrut – General Federation of Labor in Israel and a Lt. Col in the Israeli reserves, and Rami Hod – Executive Director at Berl Katznelson Center, a Progressive Zionist think tank. Congressman Dan Goldman of Brooklyn was also on the panel.

They main point of the call was to rally progressive, and in particular, labor support for the genocidal collective punishment the Israeli government, with US support, is unleashing on the 2.3 million Palestinians living in Gaza.

Food, water, and power have been cut off since Monday, at least 2,000 Palestinians have been killed in hundreds of air strikes, and Israeli officials, in the most racist terms, are calling for wiping out Gaza. The unconscionable attack by Hamas on Israeli civilians on Saturday does not give the Israeli’s the right to commit further war crimes against the Palestinians, as they have done with impunity for decades.

While I strongly disagree with the Jewish Labor Committee and the US government’s rush to support the Israeli apartheid government, I do agree with one aspect of the call; war is union business. No imperialist can wage war for long without the active or passive support of their workers, and their willingness to sacrifice for the costly war effort. Over the past decade, at various rallies in support of Palestine and against Israeli aggression, like the murder of Shareen Abu Akla, I have been the only union leader to speak publicly. Our small union can help to change that now.

There is nothing positive about the Hamas attack on Israel last Saturday, no justification, no rationale. But there is a context. History did not start on Saturday. Gaza is little more than a massive outdoor prison for its citizens. Netanyahu worked to build up Hamas as a counter to the Palestinian Authority, and in fact, Israel helped create Hamas.

The world is watching as events unfold in Gaza. Attached is the PJS update on the targeting of journalists and media outlets in the assault on Gaza. PJS has many members in Gaza. Western media is flooding the airwaves with the Hamas terror attacks, which are more visible and appalling because they were not carried out from 30,000 feet, like the hundreds of Israeli air strikes. We never get to see the murdered Palestinian children and elderly. And the coming invasion will only be much worse than anything we have seen. 

There is no short-term solution to this endless nightmare. No doubt, Randi Weingarten and Stuart Applebaum are speaking for most AFL-CIO affiliated unions, but not for all. Let’s do what we can, as limited as that may be, to oppose the current slaughter that is now underway. The answer in Israel/Palestine, and everywhere, must start with international solidarity, anti-racism, and building the unity of Jews and Palestinians, which has been done before, yet today seems unimaginable. 

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