Once again Banksy’s masterpiece: GAZA
 

Protests and general strike in Israel pose the need to break with Zionism, By Thomas Scripps, WSWS, 2/9/24 https://tinyurl.com/mpmu7n5s
 

The deaths of the six hostages brought a broad section of Israeli society face-to-face with this reality. But it cannot be changed, as the current outlook of the protests suggests, by placing pressure on Netanyahu or by replacing him with other war criminals.

No progressive struggle can be taken up against the Israeli government without opposing the genocide which has so far claimed at least 40,000—and most likely closer to 200,000—Palestinian lives.

Histadrut Chair Arnon Bar-David’s pledge that “we won’t allow life to be abandoned” must be treated with contempt. This is precisely what the nationalist Histadrut bureaucracy has done for the last 11 months.

Ignoring the call of the Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions Gaza for international solidarity action to stop the genocide in Gaza, it has worked to divide Jewish from Arab workers and allow the massacre of innocent men, women and children to continue.

Despite its enormous scale, however, this mass movement has a weakness that will prove fatal if not combatted: It has not so far embraced in any way the struggles of the Palestinian people…

To have any chance of success, Jewish workers and youth must cast off the blinders of Zionist ideology and adopt a socialist strategy…

It is impossible for Jewish workers and youth to defend their democratic rights under conditions where the Palestinian population of Israel and the occupied territories remains under savage military repression and increasingly brazen vigilante and settler violence. There cannot be military dictatorship in the West Bank and Gaza and democracy within Israel…

The only way out of the present catastrophe is a joint struggle of the international working class, including Jewish and Arab workers fighting for a United Socialist States of the Middle East, to put an end to the historic persecution and dispossession of the Palestinians with which the increasingly murderous and dictatorial development of Israeli politics is inextricably intertwined. ▲