Netanyahu Storms Rafah! – “We Have Nowhere to Go!”

The ORGANIZER

Special Antiwar Issue

May 13, 2024

www.socialistorganizer.org

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IN THIS ISSUE:

• Netanyahu Storms Rafah! – “We Have Nowhere to Go!” – by the Editors

• We Must Fight One and the Same War – by the Editors

• Socialists in Name, Pro-War in Deeds – by Alan Benjamin

• Report from Rafah: “People Evacuate to Nowhere!” – Brief excerpt from report by Mondoweiss, May 11, 2024)

• “At Issue Was and Remains the Struggle for Imperialist Hegemony in the Middle East” – Presentation on Palestine by Mya Shone to Activists at the Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexicali, Mexico

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Netanyahu Storms Rafah! – “We Have Nowhere to Go!”

By the Editors

On May 6, the Israeli air force stepped up its carpet-bombing of Rafah, “advising” residents to “evacuate.” The first order was for 110,000 to flee eastern Rafah. The next, issued Saturday, May 11, called for another 300,000. At this writing, the number of those forced to flee Rafah has surged to 500,000.

For weeks, Netanyahu had been threatening to storm the southernmost town in the Gaza Strip, home to 260,000 inhabitants before the current war. Today, 1.5 million starving, thirsty, and exhausted Palestinians live in makeshift tents, in mud, cold, and rain – with many of them mourning the death of family members.

With the Rafah crossing closed after it was seized by Israeli troops, “[t]he World Food Program announced that it will run out of food for distribution in Southern Gaza by May 13,” according to Georgios Petropoulos, an official with the U.N. Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in Rafah. 

Petropoulos continued, “humanitarian workers have no supplies to help them set up in new locations. We simply have no tents, we have no blankets, no bedding, none of the items that you would expect a population on the move to be able to get from the humanitarian system,” he said. 

The U.N. reports that 30% of children under the age of two in Gaza are acutely malnourished or wasted, 70% of the population in Northern Gaza confronts “catastrophic hunger” with an estimated 300,000 of them experiencing “full-blown famine.”

A memo from UNICEF couldn’t have been more explicit: This will be the worst bloodbath in the entire war that began seven months ago! For there is “no safe place to take refuge” for the 600,000 children parked in Rafah.

Biden’s framework will work out just fine for Netanyahu

On May 10, the U.S. State Department hurriedly “clarified” a statement made one week earlier by President Biden, who said he would halt U.S. arms deliveries to Israel if Netanyahu went ahead with the ground invasion of Rafah.

Pushed to even make such a statement by the historic pro-Palestine solidarity movement  — including the college campus protests sweeping the country —Biden told CNN’s Erin Burnett: 

“Civilians have been killed in Gaza as a consequence of those bombs and other ways in which they go after population centers. I made it clear that if they go into Rafah … I’m not supplying the weapons that have been used historically to deal with Rafah, to deal with the cities — that deal with that problem.”

Biden’s intention was to issue a sound byte to appease international public opinion … while he continues his “ironclad” support for the Zionist state. Pentagon and State department officials, on behalf of Biden, have stated time and time again that despite occasional “tactical” differences, they support Israeli objectives “unconditionally.”

U.S. Ambassador to Israel Jack Lew told Israeli Channel 12 News that, “It’s a mistake to think that anything has fundamentally changed in the relationship” between the two countries.” He added that the U.S. “concluded in the national security memorandum review that there will be no interruption in U.S. aid for Israel.”

Biden laid out a framework, and it will work out just fine for Netanyahu, despite Netanyahu’s huff-and-puff protestations. Even though Biden paused temporarily the delivery of 3,500 bombs, primarily 2,000-pound bunker-busters, it was only after having previously sent an ample supply of bombs and other weapons for Israel to carry on. “We have what we need,” boldly stated Rear Admiral Daniel Haggard, Israel’s top military spokesman. “The army has munitions for the missions it plans, and for the missions in Rafah, too.” 

What this means, journalist Mitchell Plitchard told Mondoweiss, is that Israel can continue these actions indefinitely. “This allows Netanyahu to wage a prolonged war,” Pritchard stated, “and, crucially, to increase massively the already considerable number of fatalities among Palestinians from curable disease, malnutrition, starvation, lack of access to medical care for chronic conditions, and other causes that are not included in death tolls.”

 “We’ve never told them they can’t operate in Rafah,” said John Kirby, the national security spokesman for the White House, “What we’ve told them is that the way they do it matters.”

Kirby’s statement on behalf of the Biden administration, along with the release of the State Department’s National Security Memorandum NSM-20 the same day, sent strong and clear signals from Washington.

It did not take long for Israel to get the message and widen the attack on Rafah and expand its operations in Northern Gaza, where 100,000 to 150,000 Palestinians were “advised” to “evacuate” Jabaliya refugee camp as the IDF tanks rolled in, before moving on to Beit Lahiya and Beit Hanoun.

A cynical and revolting State Department report

The State Department’s NSM-20 report, a survey ostensibly of human rights violations when U.S.-supplied lethal weapons are used, stated that Israel likely violated international law yet remained eligible to receive military aid from the United States. The language of the memo was cynical and revolting. The report reads in part:

“The U.S. Intelligence Community [IC]  has no direct indication of Israel intentionally targeting civilians. The IC assesses that Israel could do more to avoid civilian harm, however. … It was reasonable to assess that the Israeli Defense Forces had run afoul of international law in some instances. … Israel has taken some steps and developed some tools to mitigate harm to civilians … but the results on the ground raise substantial questions as to whether the IDF is using these tools effectively in all cases.”

Yet, the conclusion of the report is that “The USG [U.S. government] is not aware of defense articles covered under NSM-20 … being misused for purposes inconsistent with the intended purposes,” thus opening the floodgates to continued arms transfers.

Not all members of Congress supported this white-washed memo. “The report contradicts itself. … It reeks of cowardice – an unwillingness to state the obvious,’ said Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen.” (Washington Post, May 11) 

“A sinister joke”

Biden and his representatives claim to have “made our views clear to the Israeli government.” Josep Borrell, head of EU diplomacy, called on Israel to “put a stop to the ground offensive.” The French government says it is “opposed” to the offensive, going so far as to call it a “war crime.”

Hypocrites, Biden, Borrell and Macron! It’s their arms deliveries that Netanyahu has deployed to launch this new phase of genocide! It’s their agreements, their diplomatic relations, and Biden’s months of “ironclad and unconditional support” that give Netanyahu his audacity, despite the occasional slap on the wrists from Israel’s underwriter and main ally.

Once again, the responsibility of the leaders of the workers’ movement is to organize the mobilization of the workers of the world to join forces with students and community organizations who demand:

• Immediate Halt to the Offensive Against Rafah! 

• Lift the Siege of Gaza!

• Stop all Arms Deliveries to Israel!

• Down with Genocide!

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We Must Fight One and the Same War

By the Editors

As these lines are being written, the eyes of the world are on Rafah. If the offensive and bombing by the Israeli army that began on May 6 were to continue, as appears to be the case, it would claim tens of thousands of victims in addition to the almost 40,000 already killed. [See Editorial, Report on a Paris Rally, and article by Mondoweiss in this issue.]

At the same time, the war is intensifying in the center of Europe. French President Emmanuel Macron is proposing a “European Defense” with shared nuclear weapons.

The world is marching to war …

Yet those “on the left” who condemn the support given by capitalist governments to Netanyahu refuse to condemn the support given by the same governments to Zelensky. The same people who “on the left” call for an end to arms deliveries to Israel refuse to condemn arms deliveries to Ukraine. Worse still, in both the U.S. Congress and the European Parliament, these “left-wing MPs” vote in favor of these arms deliveries.

Can the two issues be separated? By putting the $61 billion in “aid to Ukraine” and the $26 billion in “aid to Israel” to the vote on the same day and in the same movement, Biden has spoken clearly: it is one and the same war that he is waging against workers and peoples. In the case of Ukraine, it’s a war waged in the framework of the same alliance – NATO  – led by U.S. imperialism.

We are sometimes told: “Ukraine is not the same issue” because Putin is threatening it from the other side. There is no doubt that Putin is an enemy of the working class, of democracy and freedom. But who can believe for a single minute that it is out of love for freedom and the sovereignty of peoples that Biden is financing the war in Ukraine? If his motivation were to help a people subjected to foreign invasion, why doesn’t he arm the Palestinian people who, for 75 years, have been the victims of Israeli colonization, subjugation, and displacement?

No, no one can believe that Biden and his European allies are driven by a love of freedom. It is the preservation of the imperialist “order” that leads them to get involved in the Middle East behind Netanyahu. It is in order to defend the interests of the Washington and European oligarchs against those of the Moscow oligarchs that they are involved in Ukraine.

Biden and Putin agree on one point: the “great powers” have the right to decide for the peoples. They disagree on one point: should decisions be taken in Washington or in Moscow?

The policies of each imperialist government form a whole. As far as workers and young people on the campuses in the U.S. are concerned, they see that the Biden government is waging war abroad to defend capitalist interests in the same way that it is waging war in the United States against the interests of workers and youth.

That’s why the slogan “Not a penny, not a weapon, not a person for war!” opposes both Biden’s policy abroad – in the Middle East, Central Europe, Africa – and his policy at home against workers and young people.

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Socialists in Name, Pro-War in Deeds

At a public rally in Paris on May 5 hosted by the so-called “Independent Workers Party/POI,” the rally chair and the speakers from La France Insoumise (LFI/France Unbowed) applauded loudly the speech by Jana Silverman, co-chair of the International Committee of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), when she hailed “the courage of our two DSA members of Congress — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) and Cori Bush  – who two weeks ago voted against the billions of dollars in unconditional military aid to Israel.”

Silverman made no mention of, let alone denounced, the $61 billion in U.S. funding for Ukraine. Nor did she take issue with the billions earmarked for the fledgling U.S. war against China. The reason: Silverman, the DSA, and AOC and Bush are all part of the Democratic Party “family.”

So much so that the New York Times just devoted two pages to AOC’s growing leadership role in the Democratic Party — something that has been made possible by her support for the alleged “good war” in Ukraine, as opposed to the “bad war” in Israel … when, in fact, there is but one war, the war waged by the capitalist powers, spearheaded by U.S. imperialism, against the workers and oppressed peoples the world over.— A.B.

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Report from Rafah: “People Evacuate to Nowhere!”

(Brief excerpt from report by Mondoweiss, May 11, 2024)

It’s a scene that has played over and over again in the southern Gaza city of Rafah since the beginning of the war: mothers with sad and pale faces carrying their children on their shoulders and in their hands, balancing many bags on their backs, surrounded by more children carrying bags and belongings, and men and elderly people pulling carts and pieces of luggage. The remnants of their homes and possessions now follow them throughout their displacement. Even with no place to go, they took to the streets looking for a safe place in Rafah. The only safe place left.

Now those same scenes play out again in Rafah, this time, as people try to escape to the one place they thought was safe. As people take to the streets frantically, Israeli airstrikes are nonstop, hitting several targets across the city of Rafah. 

On May 6, Israel began its usual method of displacing civilians in Gaza; this time, in Rafah. Warplanes started dropping leaflets over people’s heads, ordering them to leave their homes and go to areas that the army says are safe. And once again, as people looked to the so-called safe zones, they saw people and homes being bombed and targeted.

The army began ordering a large part of Rafah, the entire eastern part of the city, telling people to leave their homes and move West. The leaflets weren’t the only warning. Bombs have been dropping in eastern Rafah as well, over the heads of their residents, intimidating people, and spreading fear in their hearts, forcing them to move. 

Despite causing the immediate re-displacement of around 250,000 people, among a city that is now home to an estimated 1.5 million, the Israeli army claims that its operations in Rafah are limited and small.

Within just a few hours of the start of the invasion, the Israeli army had also taken over the Palestinian side of the Rafah crossing, the only bridge between Gaza and the outside world –  one of the only outlets for humanitarian aid, for the evacuation of the wounded, and for some, the only way they have been able to escape the genocide.

At the time of publication, the army had been enforcing the complete closure of the Rafah crossing for three days in a row, with reports that once its “operations” are complete, Israel will hand the crossing over to a private American firm.

With leaflets flying, bombs dropping, new “safe zones” and “evacuation routes” being drawn up, and the closure of Gaza’s only connection to the outside world, millions of people in Rafah alone are now once again asking: where will we go?

“Nowhere to go”

Saadi Salem, his two married daughters, their children, his wife, and his son are walking in Al-Awdah Street in Rafah, each carrying a small child, one of his grandchildren. They have bags and belongings – their entire lives and possessions inside. They go with everything they own, trying to reach the Al-Mawasi area in Western Rafah, without knowing if there will be room for them when they get there. 

Will they find a place for a tent and set it up again, or will they remain in the open, like hundreds of families who were in their homes and were forced to move out today?

With every new evacuation order, more families like the Salems, come seeking refuge in the area, even though there’s virtually no space left for families to set up a new tent. 

“Every place we go, the army will call us again, drop leaflets over our heads, and force us to leave. There is no longer any space to live in the Gaza Strip because of the Israeli army. All areas they say are safe today become fighting zones after a day or two. Thus, there is nowhere to go, and we do not know where to go now,” Salem told Mondoweiss. 

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“At Issue Was and Remains the Struggle for Imperialist Hegemony in the Middle East”

Presentation on Palestine by Mya Shone to Educational Meeting on April 26 at the Mexicali Campus of the Autonomous University of Baja California (UABC)

Sisters and Brothers, Comrades:

I want to thank the committee that invited me to speak today and the university for sponsoring this event. Discourse always is important and today more so about the Palestinian struggle. Yet, all too often in the United States and in other countries, university administrations and state authorities try to shut it down.

As we gather today, students on university campuses across the United States and internationally have erected tent encampments and occupied buildings to protest Israel’s genocidal war against the Palestinian people in Gaza.

As police and state troopers shut down each encampment and arrest those involved, more students take their place and new encampments are created.

These student protests, evocative of the anti-Vietnam War student strikes and occupations, enhance the massive rallies and actions worldwide in which hundreds of thousands of workers, community activists, and students demand that the United States foremost, but other countries as well, Stop Arming Israel.

Let there be no doubt that this current genocide, along with Israel’s brutal and persistent assault against the Palestinian people, as well as the Israel’s onslaught over the years against other nations, notably Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Iran, could not and would not occur without the complicit, and often explicit, support of the United States government.

Each and every Israeli fighter jet and the bombs that the Israeli military drop — bunker busters, flesh-eating phosphorus and fragmentation cluster bombs that tear at the flesh — all the artillery and the millions of rounds of ammunition are manufactured by U.S. companies and bought with billions of dollars that the U.S. government gives to Israel for this purpose. It is the $184 billion (in today’s U.S. dollars) since the administration of President John F. Kennedy that transformed Israel into the 4th largest military in the world.

President Joe Biden says that his support for Israel is “unwavering” and “ironclad.” Why, you may ask. Joe Biden has explained repeatedly since 1986 during his days as a U.S. Senator: “If there were not an Israel,” Biden states emphatically, “we’d have to invent one to protect our interests in the region.”

Thus, before we discuss the over 100-year struggle of the Palestinian people for self-determination and the Zionist forces which oppose it, let there be no doubt that for U.S. rulers and their corporate sponsors, as for other nations, the United Nations’ partition of historic Palestine in 1947 for the creation of the Israeli state marks a critical moment in the international situation.

It must be understood that the justification for the defense, and security of the Zionist state has no relationship to a worldwide commitment against anti- Semitism.

No. At issue was and remains the struggle for imperialist hegemony in the Middle East. This, inevitably, puts U.S. imperialism, as colonial domination in the region by Britain and France previously, in conflict with the Palestinian and other nationalist struggles for self-determination and control of the region’s resources. We can leave for another day discussion of ancient history, theology, or whether God, if one so believes in deity, is a real estate agent as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other Zionists contend.

We now need to discuss social and political liberation in modern times and how we can effectively stop the genocide against the Palestinian people and advance their struggle for Palestinian self-determination along with a vision of a society in all of historic Palestine — from the River to the Sea — where rights do not depend upon ethnic or religious identity.

The Palestinian struggle is at the minimum a struggle for a democratic and secular society, such as we demand for ourselves.

A democratic-secular Palestine has been the precept of the Palestinian people throughout their struggle and was enshrined in 1968 in the Palestine National Charter.

It is a fundamental aspiration that should be respected by all. Not so, the Zionists.

We must understand that Zionism and the quest for greater Israel, Eretz Israel, accompanied by the removal of the Palestinian people — is foundational to the ideology of the Zionist movement, Revisionist and Labor Zionist alike and still dominates the actions of the modern Israeli state.

In 1936, David Ben Gurion, revered as the father of the Israeli state and its first prime minister, wrote to his son: “A partial Jewish state is not the end, but only the beginning.”

“The boundaries of Zionist aspiration,” he explained in a speech in 1938 to the World Council of Poale Zion, “include southern Lebanon, southern Syria, today’s Jordan, all of Cis-Jordan (the West Bank) and the Sinai.”

In 1940, Joseph Weitz, the head of the Jewish Agency’s Colonization Department, described what that would entail: “Between ourselves it must be clear that there is no room for both peoples in this country. … there is no other way than to transfer the Arabs from here to neighboring countries — all of them not one village, not one tribe should be left.”

The quest for power and the struggle for Zionist control of a wide swath of the Middle East has been unrelenting. Just to cite a few: the Nakba, the Zionist massacres that led to the expulsion of 800,000 Palestinians in 1948; the subsequent war in June 1967 in which the West Bank and East Jerusalem were seized from Jordan, Gaza from Egypt, and Golan Heights from Syria; the targeted assassinations of Palestinian civil society and political leaders; the imposition of draconian regulations over every aspect of Palestinian life; the invasion of Lebanon in 1982 followed by an 18-year occupation of the south; 500,000 Jewish settlers in the West Bank, 220,000 in East Jerusalem and the land surrounding it with plans underway for many more Jewish settlers and expansion of the network of Jewish only highways; 118 outposts laying the groundwork for new West Bank settlements; most of the fertile Jordan Valley, which is 30% of the West Bank, is off limits to Palestinians, 86% allocated for Jewish-only settlements.

Add to this the brutality of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, including 1 million Palestinian men, women, and children imprisoned and tortured since 1967, the 16-year boycott and siege of Gaza, along with periodic massive bombardments before the current genocidal carpet bombing, siege, troop invasion, and elimination of entire villages by the Zionist state.

People throughout the world no longer are standing silently by. There is no neutral position in the struggle of the oppressed against the oppressor.

The Mexican people have a long history of struggle against colonial and imperialist domination. Yet, in 1947 the Mexican government abstained as historic Palestine was partitioned against the will of the Palestinian people.

The partition, which led to the creation of the Jewish state of Israel, did not create even a semblance of a Palestinian state. Instead, the Arab-partitioned area was incorporated into Trans-Jordan and ruled over by the Hashemite King. Nor as should have been evident to all, the Zionists will never accept a Palestinian nation even if it were to be a postage-stamp sized bit of non-contiguous pieces, let alone a state that allows for the right of return for the 7.6 million Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, the West Bank, Gaza, and the diaspora.

Today, the Mexican government says that it supports the Palestinian people even as it also states that it supports the security of the Jewish state. As I have shown in the limited time today … you cannot support both because inherently the Zionist state of Israel, as a Jewish state, is undemocratic and oppressive with the stated goal of the dispossession and expulsion of the indigenous Palestinian people, but for the few who might be allowed to remain if they accept oppression, that is, the apartheid conditions of a Jewish state.

In conclusion, our solidarity with the Palestinian people is linked to our struggle against capitalist exploitation and imperialist domination. This means inevitably that we need to create instruments of political power for the working class and oppressed communities — mass working-class parties at home that function together in a workers’ international.

[Note: As a result of the discussion, the Mexican university students decided to launch a solidarity campaign with U.S. students who organizing protests and encampments — specifically calling for their right to protest and against banning their student organizations, as well as amnesty for all who have been arrested, disciplined, suspended, and expelled.

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[NOTE: On May 2, students at the Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City erected a tent encampment following a decision by the Interuniversity and Popular Assembly in Solidarity with the People of Palestine, which includes students and activists throughout Mexico City. 

[Their demands include an end to the genocide and occupation, for the Mexican government to break diplomatic relations with Mexico, for the UNAM to break all ties with Israeli institutions, and for an end to the repression launched by university administrators and police against students in the United States and France explicitly.]