Israel’s Six Front War – Where Is It Heading? 

By Mya Shone

 Can there be any doubt by now that Israel’s Zionist government is carrying out a relentless campaign to annihilate the Palestinian people and seize all of Palestine … and more? Does anyone still think that there is a red line that Israel can cross such that U.S. imperialist rulers will no longer support it?

Let us take a brief look at where we are, October 17, 2024, as the Zionist state engages in a six-front war (Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and Iran) and the United States sends boots on the ground to Israel while it ramps up its formidable military force in the region that already includes more than 40,000 troops.

Most of Gaza’s 2.2 million people have been displaced, forced to flee time and time again, with most families crammed into a tiny slice of land along the Mediterranean Sea, subjected to ongoing bombing and facing starvation and epidemic disease as Israel cuts off even a modicum of humanitarian aid reaching Gaza. [According to the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) no food has entered northern Gaza since early October.]

Aside from the tens of thousands of dead and injured, Israeli forces, in the last 12 months, have reduced much of the Gaza Strip to rubble, such that large portions of neighborhoods and communities no longer exist. An analysis in the Guardian (Oct. 10) noted: “More than 70% of housing stock has been damaged, along with businesses and countless public buildings, including schools and hospitals.”

In addition, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) bulldozed a large swath to create the Netzarim corridor, “a militarized path that bisects Gaza into northern and southern halves” as well as a larger buffer zone along the entire eastern border (adding an extra kilometer/.62 miles in width to the pre-existing buffer along the full 60 kilometers/37 mile length of the Gaza Strip).

At least half of the Gaza Strip’s farmland has been damaged — citrus orchards and fields now in ruins. Ninety percent of Gaza’s schools and all universities have been destroyed (in whole or in part).

By May 30, the World Health Organization concluded that 84% of Gaza’s health facilities had been damaged or destroyed and more so in the four-and-a half months that have followed. An independent U.N. Commission report (Oct. 10) accused Israel of “committing war crimes and the crime against humanity of extermination with relentless and deliberate attacks” against Gaza’s hospitals, clinics, ambulances and medical workers.

“Attacks on health-care facilities,” the report charged, “are an intrinsic element of the Israeli security forces’ broader assault on Palestinians in Gaza and the physical and demographic infrastructure of Gaza, as well as of efforts to expand the occupation.” The Commission came to a definitive conclusion: “Israel has implemented a concerted policy to destroy the health-care system.” 

A survey by the group Heritage for Peace detailed 100 historical landmarks damaged, as of December 2023, including the Great Omari Mosque, one of the most important and ancient mosques in historical Palestine; the Church of Saint Porphyrius, thought to be the third oldest church in the world, along with a 2,000-year-old Roman cemetery in northern Gaza.

In all, the United Nations has concluded that Israel’s attack created by mid-August 2024 a total of 42 million tons of debris across Gaza. [That is enough rubble to fill a line of dump trucks stretching from New York to Singapore!]

“Clearing the rubble, which contains human remains and unexploded ordinance, then rebuilding,” the Guardian reports,“could take 70 years, and cost more than $80 billion.”But, economists note, this figure doesn’t consider hidden expenses, such as the long-term impact of a labor market devasted by death, injury, and trauma, as well as consideration that construction sites at this scale have to be empty of people.

But does Israel anticipate Palestinians will remain in Gaza and that Gaza will be rebuilt for them? Israel’s latest offensive against the northern part of the Gaza Strip, including a complete siege of the towns of Beit Lahia, Beit Hanoun, and Jabalia along with its refugee camp just north of Gaza City is being reported by the Israeli media as the implementation of “the Generals’ Plan.” This is the vision of retired Major General Giora Eiland, former head of the National Security Council and current advisor to Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, for the depopulation of Palestinians from Gaza and replacing them with Jewish settlers. [“Let’s Not Be Intimidated by the World,” published in Yedioth Ahronoth, Nov. 19, 2023]

As Qassam Muaddi writing for Mondoweiss, Oct. 15, concludes:

“The Generals’ Plan is a condensation of century-long colonial policy. Haifa, Yafa, Askalan, Tyberias, and West Jerusalem all used to be northern Gaza. Today, the southern Hebron Hills and the Jordan Valley, where Palestinians are not allowed to build or graze and are attacked by Israeli settlers, are a less intense version of northern Gaza. The Bedouin village in the Naqab, which are unrecognized by the state of Israel and live under the constant threat of demolition, are yet another version of northern Gaza. …

“The only thing standing in the way of the Generals’ Plan,” Muaddi states, “is the decision of more than 200,000 Palestinians to stay in the north and refuse displacement, despite the bombs, drone attacks, hunger, and brutal siege.”

Now let us look at Lebanon, which has been subjected to a never-ending Zionist attempt at Anschluss of its southern region. “New Images Show Lebanese Border Villages Flattened in Israeli Invasion” is the title of a full-page article in the New York Times, Oct. 11. “Scores of homes leveled, a damaged health clinic and a centuries-old mosque (300 years old) now little more than rubble. … Over the last week, the Israeli military has flattened large parts of two border villages: Maroun al Ras and Yaroun.” Satellite images revealed that two other mosques were destroyed along with a Catholic church. The Times reporters add that “One video showed soldiers raising the Israeli flag over a destroyed park in Maroun al-Ras.”

Over one million people, 20% of the Lebanese population have been forced so far to flee their homes with no idea which part of the country will be safe. According to the United Nations, Israel’s evacuation orders now cover one quarter of Lebanon’s land area and include more than 100 villages and urban areas. Half of Lebanon’s public schools have been turned into shelters; many families have taken refuge in tents on seaside beaches; and 300,000 people have fled the country.

This is just the tip of Israel’s battle plan. In addition, there has been large-scale bombing of the southern suburbs of Beirut, the Lebanese capital, and as in Gaza, so in Lebanon, the IDF has targeted health facilities. Firas Abiad, Lebanon’s minister of health, reported that 13 hospitals have been completely or partially shut down and that Israeli attacks have killed over 150 paramedics and health workers in the past year.

The suspense, however, remains as to the imminent attack on Iran by Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his security apparatus. U.S. President Joe Biden has given the green light, phrasing it in terms of Israel’s right to retaliate for Iran’s October 1 missile launch — we would be remiss if we did not note that Iran had itself responded to Israel’s deadly prior actions.

There is no doubt that targeting Iran’s nuclear facilities has been Netanyahu’s obsession for many years with numerous assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists, attacks on its uranium enrichment facilities, and a massive cyber-attack carried out jointly with the U.S. in which more than 1,000 centrifuges were destroyed by the Stuxnet virus.

But Israel’s war plans have gone much further.

“Two years ago,” reported NYT military reporters David E. Sanger, Eric Schmitt, and Ronan Bergman (Oct. 9), “dozens of Israeli fighter jets roared over the Mediterranean Sea, simulating a strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities, a drill the Israeli defense forces openly advertised as an exercise in ‘long-range flight, aerial refueling and striking distant targets’.

“The point of the exercise,” the reporters noted, “was not simply to intimidate the Iranians. It was also designed to send a message to the Biden administration: The Israeli air force was training to conduct the operation alone, even though chances of success would be far higher if the United States — with its arsenal of 30,000 pound ‘bunker busters’ — joined in the attack.” [The 30,000 bunker buster is the GBU-57A/B, known as the Massive Ordinance Penetrator (MOP). It requires a special stealth bomber to carry it and has so far never been used in action.]

While President Biden sent the latest U.S. surface-to-air ballistic missile intercept system — the THAAD — to Israel to beef up its defenses, along with 100 American combat troops to operate the complex system, Biden, along with Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III and Gen. Michael E. Kurilla, the head of U.S. Central Command which oversees military operations in the Middle East, supposedly has made it clear that the U.S. is not in favor of Israel attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities or its oil production (note that 90% of Iranian oil exports are bought by China).

On Tuesday, Oct. 15, as the world stood on edge hoping that a full-scale war would not be forthcoming, Netanyahu’s office released an arrogant statement: “We listen to the opinions of the United States, but we will make our final decisions based on our national interest.”

Even as the will of the people of the United States and millions more worldwide is for the U.S. government to stop arming Israel, Aaron David Miller, a former U.S. Middle East negotiator who is now with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, noted, “It strains the bounds of credulity to the breaking point to believe that the administration would act to restrict U.S. military aid to Israel as the Iran-Israel crisis heats up.” (NYT, Oct. 16)

Which leaves us with the conclusion: While we who recognize the Zionist state’s intent and U.S. imperialism’s role alongside it continue our valiant protests, actions, and demonstrations in the streets with the essential demand that not a dollar nor a dime of our tax-payer or pension funds go towards genocide and human rights violations, it is also essential for us to take the steps that can create an independent mass working-class party rooted in labor and oppressed communities which inevitably can vie for political power so that we, ourselves, stop these genocides and realize the self-determination and democratic aspirations of peoples throughout the world, the Palestinian people foremost among them. — M.S.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * *

The Bankruptcy of Zionism

By Daniel Gluckstein

A year has passed since October 7, 2023. In La Tribune des travailleurs [Workers Tribune] dated October 10, we wrote: 

“Hour after hour, the media are revising 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. A toll that is, unfortunately, set to worsen in the coming days if, as has been announced, Gaza is crushed under a carpet of bombs, faced with a ground military intervention and its population starved due to the merciless blockade decided by Netanyahu. We should also add the thousands of children killed by the Israeli army in recent decades.”

A year has passed. In memory of the victims of October 7, families and loved ones gathered, particularly in front of the monument dedicated to them.

Families and loved ones of the more than 40,000 victims massacred in Gaza – mainly civilians, especially women and children – have no monument in front of which to pay their respects. It is true that entire families were wiped out. And the survivors try to survive under the bombings that continue to kill every day, in ruined cities where the priority is to escape famine, epidemics, death and to have the wounded treated.

A year has passed. The ongoing genocide in Gaza is provoking outrage among people around the world. So no one has the power to stop the arm of the murderers? The answer is known: Israel depends, in all things – military, financial, economic – on the government of the United States, of which it is, in fact, an extension in the Middle East. If Washington decided to stop the massacre in Gaza, Israel would not have the means to continue it. 

The genocide in Gaza therefore bears the stamp “Made in USA”, but also, on a more modest scale, “Made in France”, since France has put its military resources at the service of defending Israel against Iranian missiles.

“Netanyahu is simply continuing what he has been doing for years: denying the existence of a Palestinian people who demand the legitimate rights that all peoples aspire to. This denial – and the spiral of repression and colonization that it entails – contributed greatly to the attack of October 7. 

“Writing this does not mean exonerating Hamas from its responsibility for the actions it decides, nor does it endorse its policies. But it is not Hamas that Israel has ignored for decades, it is the entire Palestinian people,” we wrote a year ago.

A year has passed. Those who today mourn the dead of October 7 must ask themselves: will the genocide and destruction in Gaza, the military offensive in the occupied West Bank, the extension of the war to Lebanon, Syria and Iran, Netanyahu’s headlong rush toward total war, will all this prevent new “October 7s”?

“We can, of course, temporarily condemn a people to silence. But we cannot make them disappear, even by terror. The legitimate national claim always ends up resurfacing,” we wrote a year ago.

October 7th is proof of the bankruptcy of Zionism, from the very point of view of the mission assigned to it by its founders at the end of the 19th century. Creating a Jewish state was – they claimed – the only way to protect Jews from persecution, pogroms, discrimination. In the aftermath of World War II, the extermination of six million Jews by the Nazis was cited as “proof” that Jews could only be safe in “their” state.

Seventy-nine years after the liberation of the camps, according to statistics from Jewish institutions themselves, the majority of people who consider themselves Jewish in the world live outside Israel (to which must be added the more than 700,000 Jews holding an Israeli passport who are permanently settled in other countries)!

There are many reasons for this choice to live where they are, despite campaigns and pressures of all kinds. Among these reasons, one observation: it is more dangerous for Jews today to live in Israel than in the rest of the world. Because from war to war, from massacre to massacre, the logic of the denial of the existence of the Palestinian people and their rights places the greatest insecurity on all the populations of the region, Jews included.

In order for October 7 not to happen again, two conditions are necessary:

The first is what Palestinian and Jewish comrades call the necessary “de-Zionization” of the region, that is, the day the Jews who live there admit that nothing gives them rights denied to others; the day the majority of them accept that as human beings among humans they will be safe in the recognition of equal rights for all, whether they speak Arabic, Hebrew or other languages, whether they worship Yahweh, Allah, Jesus or are atheists; the day the majority of them understand that the only way to live in peace in the region is to claim to live there as “de-Zionized” Jews in a secular state, then, side by side with all the other communities of the region, they will be ready to take the path that leads to peace.

The second condition is that those who claim to be “friends of the Palestinian people” stop invoking respect for the UN and its institutions. Should we recall that the only UN resolution that has been applied in Palestine – Resolution No. 181 of November 29, 1947 – decided on the partition that led to the creation of Israel for the Jews and the Nakba for the Palestinians?

The UN is partition and the Nakba. The UN is not and will never be the solution.
The future of Palestine can belong to no one other than those who inhabit it, with equal rights and duties.
The failure of Zionism puts on the agenda, for all, a free Palestine, because it is de-Zionized.

• * * * * * * * * *. * * * * *

“One of the Worst Scenes We’ve Witnessed”

The video footage sent around the world shocked even those who have become inured to the sight of death and devastation. An Israeli air strike on al-Aqsa Hospital in Deir-al-Balah, Gaza, Monday, Oct. 14, struck a compound of makeshift tents in which displaced Palestinian women and children were sleeping. People struggled to tear down the tents and rescue those who had not been immediately incinerated, burned alive by the massive flames. One mother called it “one of the worst scenes we’ve witnessed.”

When a CBS reporter asked the Biden administration for a response, a spokesperson for the White House National Security Council called the footage “deeply disturbing” and followed up quickly with the pro forma message “we have made our concerns clear to the Israeli government.”

We, however, know what this means. Actions speak louder than words and the action of the Biden/Harris administration is to supply the Zionist state with the bombs that were dropped on al-Aqsa Hospital and the planes that carried them. — M.S.

California teachers stop funding to companies that profit from war

Bay Area rank and file teachers in Berkeley, San Francisco, and Oakland already deeply engaged in efforts to stop U.S. involvement in the Israeli assault on Gaza wanted to go a step further. They sought to end the use of their pensions that fund companies which profit from genocide, apartheid, and occupation.

“As educators,” Christina Harb, a Berkeley middle school teacher explained, “we especially cannot stay silent, as we witness the impact of our investments in war profiteering on the Palestinian people of Gaza.”

The American Friends Services Committee (AFSC) had identified more than $600 million of California State Teachers’ Retirement System (CalSTRS) assets invested in companies that directly enable the ongoing genocide in Gaza as well as Israel’s apartheid governance with respect to the Palestinian people.

The Berkeley teachers developed a divestment resolution which was adopted overwhelmingly by the Berkeley Federation of Teachers (AFT 1087) which presented it to the California Federation of Teachers (CFT) leadership until it reached the State Council of delegates from 147 union locals representing 120,000 educators. 

With further assistance of Los Angeles Educators for Justice in Palestine, the rank and file teachers called every one of the 147 delegates to urge passage of the final resolution. 

While the CalSTRS investments that have impact on the ongoing genocide in Gaza are significant in themselves, CFT recognized that the $600 million is just the tip of CalSTRS war industry involvement. With $346.5 billion in assets, CalSTRS is the second largest pension fund in the United States and the largest educator-only public pension fund in the world. CalSTRS owns almost $199 million worth of shares in Boeing and almost $85 million worth of shares in General Dynamics, to name just two major companies involved in fighter jet and bomb manufacturing.

The final resolution, adopted October 5 by a majority of delegates, is a demand for divestment from all companies that profit from war and human rights violations. It is a model for all unions to adopt and reads in part that CalSTRS should: “divest from assets and companies that consistently and directly profit from, enable or facilitate human rights violations, violations of international law, prolonged military occupations, apartheid, or genocide, including weapons manufacturers and companies that build technology such as artificial intelligence and surveillance technology for military use.”