“Ceasefire”? The Genocide Continues

By Mya Shone

[reprinted from February 2025 issue of The Organizer Newspaper]

The words no sooner were out of President Donald Trump’s mouththanadministration officials, if not Trump himself, were trying to walk them back. With Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu grinning by his side, Trump stated boldly:

All 2.2 million Palestinians should permanently depart Gaza for Jordan and Egypt where communities will be built with funding from Arab nations. “The U.S.,” he said, “will take over the Gaza Strip,” — in fact, “own it” — clear it of rubble and unexploded munitions and create a “Riviera of the Middle East.”

No room for doubt

“Ethnic cleansing,” “forced transfer,” “a serious violation of international law … and “a major destabilizing force for Egypt and Jordan,” were immediate responses from international heads of state as well as the Palestinians themselves.

The Saudi monarchy left no room for doubt about its position. “Unequivocal rejection,” of any attempt to displace the Palestinians read the statement from Riyadh. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman ruled out any normalization with Israel without the establishment of an “independent Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital.”

Trump, however, was not fazed. With full braggadocio, his response remained, “The king in Jordan and the general in Egypt will open their hearts and give us the land we need to get this done.”

Trump may be counting upon the power of the purse, as both Jordan and Egypt rely upon U.S. funding. [More than $31 billion to Jordan since 1949 and more than $80 billion in U.S. military and economic aid to Egypt since the 1978 Camp David Accords.]

No fools

While Trump views his “long-term ownership position” in Gaza as “bringing stability” to the Middle East, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi and Jordan’s King Abdullah are no fools.

The Zionists have never been shy about their plans to annex Judea and Samaria and drive the remaining Palestinians from the West Bank across the river into Jordan. Then, there are the proposals by the Misgav Institute for National Security and Zionist Strategy (Oct. 17, 2023) for the “relocation and final settlement of the entire Gaza population” to the Sinai desert as well as “the General’s Plan”, the vision of retired Major General Giora Eiland, former head of the National Security Council, for the depopulation of Palestinians from Gaza in order to replace them with Jewish settlers (published in Yedioth Ahronoth, Nov. 19, 2023).

El-Sisi and Abdullah realize that their own survival is at stake. They have confronted already the power of the street. Nor can they risk becoming a base for Palestinian resistance as Jordan had once been for the Palestine Liberation Organization. Either might inspire revolts which could topple them and spread throughout the Middle East.

Send in the troops

Just how far will Trump go to remove the Palestinian presence from Gaza? He made his position clear after a reporter asked directly: “Will the U.S. send troops to Gaza?”

“We’ll do what is necessary,” Trump asserted. “If troops are necessary. We’re going to take over that piece …”

Don’t think you can push us aside, warned Basem Naim, a member of the Hamas political bureau in Gaza. Palestinians, once again, have shown their “steadfastness” — this time over 15 months of intense attacks in Gaza. Any U.S. troops sent to the territory, he stated, would face the same opposition as the Israeli military.

“What the occupation has failed to do, no American administration or power in the world will succeed in implementing,” Naim told the Guardian newspaper.

Zionist Objectives

Zionism, from its inception, has had the goal of removing the Palestinian people from their homeland. In 1940, Joseph Weitz, the head of the Jewish Agency’s Colonization Department wrote: “Between ourselves it must be clear that there is no room for both peoples together in this country. … There is no other way than to transfer the Arabs from here to neighboring countries — all of them.”

That transfer began before the ink was dry on the partition plan imposed by the United States and Soviet Union on the Palestinian people and remains the project to this day. Between November 29, 1947, when the United Nations partitioned Palestine and May 15, 1948, when the State of Israel was formally proclaimed, the Zionist army and militias seized even more than the territory allotted for a Jewish state until the Zionists controlled 77% of historic Palestine.

Two-thirds of the Palestinian population fled or were expelled from their homes, villages, towns, and cities — land that had been occupied continuously by their ancestors for five thousand years (since 3,000 B.C.). This was the Nakba, “catastrophe”.

Then, in June 1967, 280,000 to 325,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled from the West Bank and Gaza during the Israeli-instigated Six-Day War (the Naksa, “setback”).

Today, these Palestinians, along with their descendants, comprise the 5.9 million Palestinians that the United Nations recognizes as refugees with the “right of return”. One-third live in “refugee camps” in Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon, eight “camps” in Gaza, and 19 in the West Bank. [In total, there 14.8 million Palestinians in the world as of mid-2024, 5.6 million living within historic Palestine and 7.4 million in the diaspora.]

The Genocide continues

Hebrew University of Jerusalem Holocaust scholars Daniel Blatman and Amos Goldman recently joined the ranks of who have concluded that Israel committed genocide in Gaza. “There is no Auschwitz and no Treblinka there. However, it is a crime from the same family — a crime of genocide” they wrote in Haaretz, Jan. 30.

Of the 61,700 killed, at least 18,000 were children. Additionally, 110,265 were injured. Between 60 and 80 percent of these casualties were noncombatants, a ratio higher than found in any other war to date in the 21^stcentury and, still the death toll is expected to rise much higher. 

An article published July 5, 2024 in Lancet, the renowned British medical journal, gave a conservative estimate that 185,000 may yet die in Gaza as the result of “reproductive, communicable, and non-communicable diseases” since there is insufficient food, housing and sanitation, as well as a barely functioning health care system.

According to the United Nations, the estimate for reconstruction is 70 years with a cost more than $80 billion. What do you expect after 85,000 tons of U.S.-supplied bombs destroyed almost all of Gaza’s infrastructure (including 90% of the housing units) and, the Israeli army additionally bulldozed many neighborhoods off the map?

“We will need to face the reality and understand the depth of the horror we have inflicted,” was the message Blatman and Goldman conveyed to Israeli Jews as well as Jews throughout the world.

The Iron Wall

That “horror” continues as the Zionists intensify operations in the West Bank. The latest offensive, launched shortly after the 60-day ceasefire in Gaza was announced, was dubbed the “Iron Wall,” the title of Vladimir Jabotinsky’s 1923 benchmark essay for the Zionist movement. [See The Hidden History of Zionism by Ralph Schoenman, Chapter Two, Zionist Objectives.]

Sweeping raids and aerial attacks have killed people in Jenin, Tubas, Nablus, Tulkarem, Hebron, Bethlehem, and East Jerusalem. Entire residential blocks have been destroyed along with roads and infrastructure. Thousands of people have been forcibly removed — 75% of the 15,000 Palestinians from the Tulkarem refugee camp alone. Doctors Without Borders reports that an Israeli blockade has caused a shortage of “vital” supplies such as fuel, water, food and hygiene kits.

“The [Israeli] occupation authorities are expanding their all-out war on the Palestinian people in the West Bank to implement their plans aimed at displacing citizens and carrying out ethnic cleansing,” Palestinian Authority spokesman Nabil Abu Rudeineh said in a statement.

We shall prevail

The Palestinian struggle is not isolated — it is part of the global fight against capitalist exploitation and imperialist war. The U.S. bankrolls Israel’s military machine while arms manufacturers profit from every bomb dropped on Gaza and every shot fired in the West Bank. The same ruling class that funds the annihilation of the Palestinian people is the same that exploits workers at home and crushes resistance movements worldwide. 

The united front movement to stop arming Israel must not lose momentum. But beyond immediate demands, we must advance the call for a democratic secular Palestine from the river to the sea.

The Palestinian struggle for self-determination will take center stage at the upcoming at the International Emergency Meeting Against the Global Imperialist War (March 21-22). 

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Statement by the Organising Committee for the Reconstitution of the Fourth International (OCRFI)

Trump’s threats against the Palestinian people in Gaza

All workers and peoples of the world are concerned!

Trump’s statement on 4 February threatening to “take control” of the Gaza Strip and, after expelling two million Palestinians, turn it into the “Riviera of the Middle East” should not be taken lightly. This is the first time since the collapse of Hitler in May 1945 that the head of State of a major imperialist power has openly called for the mass deportation of people on this scale.

These threats come on top of those that have been made since 20 January: the annexation of Greenland, the Panama Canal and Canada, accelerated preparations for war against China, and threats against Mexico. These measures of war “abroad” are indissociable from the war declared “at home” against the American working class and democratic freedoms, the first victims of which are that part of the working class known as immigrant workers.

Trump’s threats about Gaza are extremely serious. No one can take them lightly. They concern workers and peoples the world over.

They are a direct response to the movement by which, at the end of January and in defiance of those who forbade them to do so, 500,000 Palestinians – men, women, children and the elderly – walked dozens of kilometres back to the north of the Gaza Strip “to pitch their tents on the ruins of their homes”.

Despite fifteen months of genocide unleashed by Israel – which had planned to “empty” and annex the north of the Gaza Strip – and despite the suffering and sacrifice of tens of thousands of lives, the Palestinian people showed that they would not give up their right to return, their right to their land or their desire to form their own nation. This movement is that of the Palestinian revolution, whose driving force since 1948 has been the demand for the right of return. The persistence of elementary democratic demands for the right of return, the right to the land and to a nation, is intolerable to imperialism.

By threatening direct U.S. intervention in Gaza, including military intervention, Trump has implicitly cast doubt on the ability of the Zionist state to continue to play the role it has played for seventy-six years as the advanced outpost of U.S. imperialism in the Middle East. And this despite Netanyahu’s enthusiastic declarations, and the eagerness of his Defence Minister to “instruct the IDF (Israeli army) to prepare a plan to enable voluntary departure for Gaza residents to any country willing to accept them.” At the same time, denying Trump’s comments on the possibility of sending US troops to Gaza, Secretary of State Rubio reminded us that, fifty years on, the spectre of its bitter defeat in Vietnam still haunts the heights of U.S. imperialism.

The indignant reactions of the reactionary Arab regimes (starting with Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia), the UN, the European Union and its main heads of state such as Macron and Starmer can fool no one. Along with Biden, they have all supported Netanyahu’s genocide in Gaza and his crimes in the West Bank, which are now allowing Trump to take things to the next level. And the imperialist countries have armed and financed Israel. All those among them who counter Trump’s provocations by arguing for a supposed “two-state solution” are coming up against the reality that there is no alternative: either expulsion and genocide, or a secular and democratic Palestinian State on the entire territory of historic Palestine, guaranteeing all its citizens equal rights.

There are no doubt other reasons why Trump made his statements, such as the recent discoveries of offshore gas fields, not to mention his son-in-law’s involvement in “real estate” projects in the Gaza Strip. From this point of view, Trump’s reasoning is no different from when he made his military aid to Ukraine conditional on the plundering of natural resources. Just as his preparations for war against China are motivated first and foremost by Wall Street’s demand to bring down China’s economy based on State ownership, in order to plunder the economy and natural resources that belong to the Chinese people.

In all circumstances, Trump is simply expressing the need of the capitalist class in the United States to do what it wants, where it wants and how it wants without hindrance, crushing the rest of the world and plunging humanity into barbarism. This is the real content of his “America first” slogan.

Trump and his fascistic brutality are simply the expression of the impasse of the rotting capitalist system, the only alternative to which is the fight for socialism. The Organising Committee for the Reconstitution of the 4th International states:

– It is not up to the Trump administration to decide the future of the Palestinian people or any people: this administration is the enemy of all the workers and peoples of the world.

– Nor is it for the UN or the international institutions, which are complicit in the crimes against the Palestinian people, to decide. – It is the revolutionary mobilisation of workers throughout the world and in the United States that will open up a future for the peoples, including the Palestinian people. – It is the inalienable right of Palestinian refugees to exercise their right of return, whether they are refugees from 2025, 1967 or 1948.

These questions will be at the heart of the contribution that OCRFI activists will make to the emergency international meeting against global imperialist war, which will bring together activists, groups and currents of all tendencies in the labour movement in Paris on 21 and 22 March.

6 February 2025