WWIII threatens after Israel’s renewed ground invasion of Gaza. Despite Iran’s fears of a US attack from its Fifth and Sixth fleets now in the region it will be impossible to hold back Hezbollah in Lebanon, the West Bank Palestinians, Syria and Jordan, such is the outrage on the Arab street at the obvious intention to ethnically cleanse and mass slaughter; a second Nakba. China will have to respond if Iran is attacked.

Biden’s $106 billion for Ukraine and Israel is the preparation for this; $61.4bn for Ukraine and 14.3bn for Israel. The Kiev regime in Ukraine is basically fronting a US/Nato attack on Russia but is clearly losing that war, their “Spring Offensive” has miserably failed. So WWIII is their pressing agenda now.

Israel is the US’s unsinkable aircraft carrier in the Middle East; they could not continue to exist for long if the US stopped its almost $4 billion annual subsidy. We reject with contempt the proposition that is shoved down out throats by the mass media like the ‘liberal’ Guardian and Observer that the US has sent its Sixth Fleet to join its Fifth in the region to make sure the conflict does not spread. Biden and Trumps seek to reassert US global hegemony.

As Class Consciousness (Australia) correctly observes:

“It is not an accident of timing that the US seeks to escalate war in West Asia in the wake of the failed “Spring Offensive” by Ukraine forces against Russia. The US and its NATO allies attempts to use its fascist proxy in Kiev has turned into a bloody quagmire for Ukrainian forces and even the bourgeois press has had to acknowledge the obvious that the war has failed in its military aims to weaken and even break up Russia. France as the representative of Western imperialism has faced a similar disaster with a string of anti-French coups in Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger.”

The IDF bombed the Al-Ahli Arab Baptist Hospital in Gaza City, having previously targeted it twice, telling them to evacuate or be killed. We reject Israel’s  blaming a misfired launch by Islamic Jihad. Even BBC journalist Jon Donnison was forced to point out on air that, “we have never seen anything on the scale of the explosion on the video I was watching” from Islamic Jihad. Aljazeera proved this beyond doubt. They bombed the Orthodox Saint Porphyrius Church (built in 1150), schools, all hospitals and refugee centres.

    Biden, Sunak, Starmer, Scholz and Macron immediately accepted the lie. But the masses in the Arab world and consistent anti-imperialists in the West rallied to the Palestinians, as did 150,00 in London on the 14th, 300,000 on 21st and 500,00 + on the 28th.

   Whilst hypocritically claiming to want to minimise civilian casualties in its relentless bombardment of Gaza it is clear that the aim of the fascist-infested Israeli regime and its imperialist backers is to maximise civilian casualties by punishing and terrorising  them for having democratically elected Hamas as their leadership in the first place so as to prepare the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. Hamas was initially supported by Israel and the US to undermine Yasser Arafat and the PLO; any leadership the Palestinians have who make any attempt to defend them is and was unacceptable.

We salute the Palestine Action who shut down the Leicester factory of Israeli drone supplier Elbit hours after the massacre at al-Ahli Arab and the workers in Belgium, the US and elsewhere stopping weapons for Israel. Workers everywhere should black all weapons heading for Israel, Ukraine and the coming WWIII.

 We will not ‘condemn’ Hamas

The Israeli and far right attacks on the Al-Aqsa Mosque inflamed the situation. Aljazeera reported on 6 Apr 2023:

“The Bureau of the United Nation General Assembly’s Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People has condemned Israeli police’s raids on Palestinian worshippers inside Al-Aqsa Mosque… The bureau calls for respect the freedom of all worshippers to access the religious sites in accordance with established parameters”.

So today we will not ‘condemn’ Hamas for its invasion of southern Israel or for its reactionary acts like the reported shooting of ravers at the Supernova festival and the Kfar Aza kibbutz. Most killed were IDF and many died in Israeli crossfire. Israelis have reported they   killed hostages rather than allow them to be taken.

We do not ‘condemn’ the native American massacres in Jamestown-1609 to 1622— 350 white settlers, or Nat Turner’s 1831 slave uprising in Virginia, killing nearly 60 white people, mostly women and children. Or the Zulu massacre of Boers in South Africa. Or the excesses of the Algerian FLN or the Mau Mau in Kenya or the IRA in the north of Ireland.

All these oppressed uprisings committed massacres but these were small compared to outrages committed by the state-sponsored racist settlers, the KKK, neo-Nazis in South Africa, Ireland and Israel. The Glenanne gang was soldiers from the UDR, police officers from the RUC, and members of the Mid-Ulster Brigade of the UVF who assassinated some 200 random Catholic civilians in the 1970s and 80s. The Dublin and Monaghan bombings and the Miami Showband massacre was the work of this group, directed by MI6. Britain refuses to release the state papers to the Irish Government.

In July 1946 the fascistic militias Irgun, led by Menachem Begin and the Stern Gang hanged two Brutish soldiers,  killed many other British troops and bombed the King David hotel, killing 91. In the 1947-8 Nakba the Haganah drove 750,000 Palestinians from their homes and lands and stole 78% of historic Palestine. They razed 531 villages including infamously Deir Yassin. David Ben-Gurion, the so-called socialist Zionist ‘father of the nation’, justified the slaughter of 15,000 men, woman and children in more than 700 massacres.

A New Warsaw Ghetto Slaughter

The UN says that from 2008 to Oct 7, there has been 6,407 Palestinian killed compared to 308 Israeli (20+ to 1). But just after October 7 Israel counted only 900 dead and only 794 Palestinian fatalities, the first time there was such an imbalance. Israel counts 1,222 dead, including 350 military—but by 25/11 Gaza had 20,000 dead including 8,000 children, including those vaporised or under inaccessible ruins. Israel had murdered 250 on the West Bank before Oct 7 and 250 since. Detained are doubled to over 8,300, 25% without charge, including 500-700 children, some as young as 12. But we must concern ourselves ONLY with the 139 Jewish hostages in Gaza. The IDF have now arrested the al-Shifa hospital director and staff.

More than 50% of buildings in Gaza have been damaged or destroyed. Even in the 7-day ceasefire to allow exchange of hostages the aid trucks allowed in at the Rafah crossing are crumbs; unrelenting bombing will resume. Some 1.9 million have been evacuated to  the north of Gaza but bombed on the way and bombed when they arrived. Now they have been ordered to move again.

On 19 April 1943 in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising SS-Brigadeführer Jürgen Stroop ordered the destruction of the Ghetto, block by block. 300,000 were slaughtered eventiually, another Holocaust  is looming in Gaza.

Tony Greenstein, who father was  Rabbi Solomon Greenstein, writes:

“Netanyahu has already promised, as if a Nazi General, to raze Gaza to the ground. Yoav Gallant, Israel’s Defence Minister has already called the Palestinians ‘human animals’ thus betraying the racist nature of Zionism and its treatment of the Palestinians… In 2015 Deputy Defence Minister Eli Dahan also called Palestinians ‘animals’”.

Hitler and Rosenberg dehumanised Jews as “human animals” to prepare the Holocaust. The fascist Gallant also said, “We are imposing a complete siege on Gaza. There will be no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel. Everything will be closed”, clearly illegal collective punishment. But the ICC in the Hague is a toothless beast when on the war crimes of the US and its allies like the 1968 Mai Lai massacre, Abu Ghraib 2003,  40,000 civilian dead in the 2017 siege of Mosul, etc.

German soldiers lead Jews captured during the Warsaw ghetto uprising to the assembly point for deportation. Poland, May 1943.

Keir Starmer Supports Geocide

“In a widely shared clip, the Labour leader was asked what a “proportionate” response would look like, to which Sir Keir replied that responsibility “lies with Hamas” and that Israel “has the right to defend herself”. Presenter Nick Ferrari interjected: “A siege is appropriate? Cutting off power, cutting off water?” The Labour leader replied: “I think that Israel does have that right. It is an ongoing situation.” (Sky News)

Shadow minister Imran Kahn and two council leaders have resigned over this endorsement of war crimes along with more than 50 Muslim and other councillors. Shadow ministers are now demanding a ceasefire. Scottish Labour party leader, Anas Sarwar, has condemned the occupation and siege and said the Starmer has made hurtful remarks and repair work is needed. But David Evans, Labour General Secretary, has banned all discussion of Gaza in the party despite the widespread opposition in party and public—democracy has indeed been hollowed out in Labour.

A Multi-Ethnic Workers’ State

Although Hamas is no less reactionary and more so on social issues than US/Israeli stooge Mahmoud Abbas’ bogus Palestinian Authority nevertheless it is fighting Israeli terror now. It expresses the anger of the oppressed, in a very distorted way it is true, so it deserves unconditional but critical support against Israel now.

The two state solution is utterly reactionary. This would be a constantly-bombed Bantustan for the Palestinians and  Israel would remain the unsinkable US aircraft carrier there. We are for the destruction of the apartheid settler-colonial state of Israel and for a multi-ethnic workers’ state of Palestine from the river to the sea.  Of course we need a revolutionary Trotskyist party to lead that revolution in Occupied Palestine/Israel to fight for a socialist federation of the Middle East leading to a global socialist federation led by a regenerated Trotskyist Fourth International. ▲

There is no comparison between the levels of GDP in Israel and Gaza. In 2023, the IMF estimates Israel’s GDP to be $522 billion for Israel while the GDP of West Bank and Gaza was just above $18 billion in 2021 and was estimated (by the World Bank) to be $20 billion in 2023. 31 Oct 2023.