T.O. Special Issue (Part 1): Act Now to Lift the Siege of Gaza and End All Aid to Apartheid Israel!

Editorial by Mya Shone

(reprinted from the October 2023 issue – no. 104 – of The Organizer Newspaper)

We cannot and we shall not stand silently by as the Zionist state of Israel, with the support of United States rulers, lays waste to Gaza and creates a second Nakba. Over 1 million Palestinians — half the population of Gaza — are fleeing south today [October 13] towards Egypt with only what they can carry in their arms and on their backs.

Their flight itself is perilous as Israeli planes bomb southern Gaza. How they will find shelter and survive is inconceivable since the Zionist state has blocked all food, water, electricity, and fuel from Gaza and refuses to establish a “humanitarian corridor.”

Is this the Zionist version of the “final solution,” another stage in its project to rid Eretz Yisrael (the Biblical Land of Israel) of its indigenous Palestinian population — “a people too many.”

We, along with masses throughout the Arab world and the burgeoning solidarity movement in the United States and Europe, stand with the Palestinian people’s unrelenting efforts to resist and to struggle for their self-determination.

The question before the Israeli people was never if but when, Hamas, an Islamic fundamentalist group, which we do not endorse, might launch a lethal attack in Israel. It is only hubris that enables a repressive society to think it can contain the oppressed forever.

When the unprecedented assault came on Saturday, October 7, it did not involve sophisticated military tactics. Hamas militants, using a construction backhoe, broke through the “Iron Wall,” the billion-dollar fence Israel erected to contain 2.1 million Palestinians in Gaza. Youth on motorcycles and in battered pickup trucks, assault weapons in hand, streamed into neighboring Israeli towns, settlements (Kibbutzim), and an army base.

A Question that Must be Asked

As the Israeli government pursues its genocidal course, Jewish people in Israel, as well as people of conscience here in the United States, must ask: Is the Zionist state acting in our best interests? For if the truth be known, each and every Zionist government — be it Revisionist or Labor — set out to destroy Palestinian national aspirations and, even more so, to rid the land of the Palestinians themselves.

There can be no accommodation with the Zionist aspiration of an exclusively Jewish society, or with one based upon apartheid. The choice before the Jews who settled in Palestine is whether they can live together with the Palestinian people and other Arabs in a democratic and secular society where rights flow from citizenship and not from religious or ethnic origin.

This vision of a democratic secular Palestine from the river to the sea — including the right of return for all Palestinian refugees — had been enshrined in the charter of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).

The PLO held to this vision even as it was confronted with assassination of its leaders, brutalization and imprisonment of youth, ongoing confiscation of land, and onerous restrictions meant to destroy the fabric of Palestinian life.

In abandoning its vision in 1988 in anticipation of a never-to-be-realized Bantustan on less than 20% of its carved up West Bank, the PLO relegated itself to serving as the guarantor of Israeli security and thus turned against its own people.

As the Zionist state crushed every form of peaceful opposition (demonstrations, strikes, publications), imprisoned secular Palestinians, and destroyed the PLO social service apparatus, it should come as no surprise that Hamas, which evolved from the Muslim Brotherhood, flourished along with the social services that the Zionists allowed it to provide.

For if the Zionists have not written the playbook for oppressing a people, they most certainly have expanded upon it, refining the instruments of terror, torture, and collective punishment.

The result: the Jewish population who settled in or are born in Palestine live within a security state wherein all Jewish men and women are involved inevitably in a never-ending stream of military actions and wars, escalating in their intensity, as we see unfolding today.

Need we say more about the foundation of the Zionist state?

“I saw cut-off genitalia and women’s crushed stomachs. … It was direct murder, ” stated Ziv Ankori, commander of the Haganah —the military wing of the Labor Zionists — when describing a massacre in the Palestinian village of Deir Yassin, April 9, 1948, four months after the United Nations’ partition of Palestine. The assault on Deir Yassin had been a joint operation of Lehi and Irgun (Revisionist Zionist paramilitary) supported by artillery firepower from the Palmach (Haganah).

The description by Jacques de Reynier, then director of the International Red Cross in Palestine, is just as harrowing. Houses were blown up with people inside, most of them women and children. By the end of the slaughter, 254 Palestinians were murdered, nearly half of the village’s population. Those who survived were force-marched in their blood-soaked clothing in a victory parade through the streets of Jerusalem.

While the massacre at Deir Yassin has gone down in the annals of history, it does not stand-alone. Zionist forces repeated the slaughter systematically in village after village, town after town. The massacres were followed by forced expulsions if the Palestinians didn’t flee on their own.

A case in point is Lydda and Ramle (known today as the Israeli cities of Lod and Ramla). They, too, had been within the area assigned by the United Nations to Palestinians.

In July 1948, between 50,000 to 70,000 Palestinians were force-marched from Lydda and Ramle by the Israeli Defense Forces (the military created after declaration of the Israeli state). They were able to take only what they could carry on foot. Israeli soldiers were stationed along the “road” to keep the Palestinians moving while a plane flew low overhead to reinforce the point. As if that were not enough, the Yiftah Brigade (Palmach) was ordered to strip the refugees of “every watch, piece of jewelry, or money, or valuables” as they passed through checkpoints and shoot those who would not comply.

The Lydda Death March is seared into the collective memory of Palestinians, among them George Habash, who in 1967 founded the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a Marxist-Leninist formation within the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).

In 1948, Habash had just returned to Lydda from Lebanon where he studied medicine at the American University of Beirut. It took all his strength and courage, Habash recounted, just to stay alive as he witnessed infants, children, the sick, and elderly collapse and die as they marched in the raging summer heat, his neighbor, Amin Hanhan, shot dead by Israeli soldiers when he refused to give up his money.

This is the Nakba, the intended mass expulsion of 800,000 Palestinians as the Zionists extended the territory of the Israeli state. It created, according to the United Nations, a refugee population of almost 6 million today — of whom 1.4 million are squeezed into Gaza (almost 70% of Gaza’s population) where they face a humanitarian crisis of historic proportions.

Apartheid State at the Service of U.S. Imperialism

If that were all, it should inspire a fierce resistance from any people. For here is a brutal colonial-settler project transformed into an apartheid state that wages war against the Palestinian people, daily seizes more of their land and threatens surrounding nations as it pursues the vision of its Zionist founders of Eretz Yisrael extending from “the Brook of Egypt to the Euphrates” (including parts of Lebanon and Syria).

The Zionist state of Israel, with a population smaller than that of New York City, has had its military funded and supplied by the United States since its inception. As a result, Israel has evolved into the fourth largest military in the world (U.S., China, Russia) receiving $3.31 billion/year (the cost of U.S. missile defense spending for Israel’s Iron Dome system is not included in this figure).

This is not a matter of the United States considering Israel as a guarantor for the survival of Jews in the world and a bulwark against anti-Semitism, as U.S. President Biden and others would have us believe.

Instead, as Israel’s Zionist founders promised, the Israeli state serves the interests of imperialist domination and the suppression of revolution by the Arab masses and working class, the Palestinians foremost among them. At the very least, we in the United States demand: End All Aid to Apartheid Israel.

Lebanese comedian Shaden Fakih in an Instagram video gave expression to the sentiment throughout the Arab world when she said: “What do you expect from the Palestinians? To get killed every day and not do anything about it … to die silently?” We can be against Hamas,” she explained “and still support any armed resistance against the oppressor, against [Israeli] apartheid.”

As Daniel Gluckstein wrote in his editorial on October 11 for La Tribune des Travailleurs (Workers Tribune), “[French] 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.”

We, in Socialist Organizer, as we imagine all of you, do not want to see 1.5 million or more Palestinians die in pursuit of their rights and with them a large number of Jews in Israel, too. While we sustain our unconditional support for the Palestinian people, we reach out to Israeli Jews to consider the truly democratic option and a better life for all.

We stand firm in our commitment and ask you to pledge, too:

End All Aid to Apartheid Israel

For a Democratic and Secular Palestine