Palestinians bombed and starved – Netanyahu’s plans to ethnically cleanse Gaza  

Once again, the people of Gaza are being bombed, shot and starved. Israel has imposed a complete blockade of water, food, electricity, and medical supplies. All humanitarian aid is withheld to Gaza. The World Food Programme said all bakeries it supported in Gaza were forced to shut for lack of fuel and flour. Hot meals will run out within two weeks, the agency warns. 

“More than 2.1mn people are trapped, bombed and starved again, while, at crossing points, food, medicine, fuel and shelter supplies are piling up, and vital equipment is stuck,” reported the leaders of six UN agencies. 

This Israeli state barbarism is intended to ethnically cleanse the Palestinian population and annex their land. A genocidal, ethnic cleansing operation by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, with the military and financial aid of the US and other western imperialist powers, is being conducted in front of a horrified world. 

Yet this medieval-style siege is studiously downplayed or ignored by much of the mainstream mass media. Palestinians are often dehumanised and demonised by right-wing politicians and sections of the media, to try to justify the IDF’s actions. At the same time, Israeli government propaganda and lies are given credibility and authority. 

There is no guarantee that the murderous plans of Netanyahu, backed up by Trump, will come to pass. Several factors could stay their hands. Divisions opening up within both Israeli and US administrations, as worldwide revulsion grows at their aims for a forcible removal of Palestinians can lead to hesitation and retreat and the collapse of Netanyahu’s coalition government. Most importantly, is the potential role of mass resistance by Palestinians and the Arab masses in the region, as well as continuing solidarity mobilisations by youth and the working class globally.  

For over a year and a half, millions of people have taken to the streets to protest against the horrors unfolding in Gaza. This includes demonstrations in Israel against war by courageous protesters. In many countries, peaceful protesters are increasingly facing state repression. In March, British police raided a meeting of young people discussing anti Gaza war actions in a Quaker hall in central London. A Mothers Against Genocide protest at parliament buildings in Dublin was attacked by Irish police and some of those arrested were strip searched. Three EU and one US citizens living in Germany for years face deportation after taking part in Gaza protests in Berlin. Foreign students in the US are facing deportation for opposing the Israeli government. Palestinians and Arabs living in Europe and the US are specifically threatened by repression.

No confidence in ‘international community’

The last 18 months shows that no confidence can be given to the ‘international community’ – in reality, meaning capitalist institutions and capitalist influenced actions – to bring peace and justice to Palestinians. The war criminal Netanyahu found a warm welcome at the White House last week. 

The Arab states’ rotten, corrupt elites will invoke solidarity with Palestinians when it proves necessary to assuage the angry mood on their streets. But these authoritarian regimes have shown nothing but shameful inaction in the face of the genocidal attacks. The Palestinian Authority is barely any better under the corrupt and unpopular leadership of Abbas and his Fatah party. 

Only the working class, youth and students, who have marched and protested in their millions, are genuine in wanting to stand up to the Gaza catastrophe. They have occupied campuses, blocked roads, scaled parliament buildings, boycotted Israeli goods, taken direct action at arms factories supplying Israel, and carried out thousands more collective and individual actions. Trade unionists around the world have demanded that their union leaderships show some mettle on this issue. Only workers, youth and the oppressed can be relied on to show solidarity with the Palestinians and their struggle for national liberation. 

Vital to strengthening the anti-war movement in every country is to begin to build mass political parties that stand in solidarity with the Palestinian masses and in opposition to the capitalist warmongers. Such parties will not succeed if confined to one issue alone; mass democratic workers’ parties are needed, with clear socialist programmes.

 For over a month, Israel has unleashed a new major assault across the Gaza Strip. Over 1400 Palestinians have perished, including entire families. Hospitals have been targeted with bombs. Another journalist in Gaza was killed on 7 April in an IDF attack, as the Israeli government tries to also kill the news of their war crimes being brought to the attention of the world. Still to this day the Israeli government refuses to allow foreign journalists to freely enter Gaza, where the IDF obviously have plenty they want to hide. But the IDF’s lies were exposed this week when mobile phone footage on 23 March showed Israeli forces killing 15 unarmed humanitarian workers, including Palestine Red Crescent workers. 

Israel’s renewed attacks have pushed the death toll in Gaza to over 50,000 people since its military response to the October 7th, 2023, Hamas attacks (over 6,000 Palestinians were killed by the IDF from 2014 2023). Since ending the ceasefire Israel has issued forced evacuation orders for communities across Gaza. Once more, many thousands are displaced, forced to move with few possessions for the second, third or fourth time in a few months. 

Meaningless ‘ceasefire’

The truth is that there was never a meaningful ceasefire. During the two-month ‘truce’, Israel stepped up repression in the West Bank and repeatedly violated the Gaza agreement, killing hundreds of Palestinians in Gaza by drone strikes and sniper fire, while imposing a complete blockade. Netanyahu then tore up the ceasefire agreement and returned to all out attacks against Palestinians, with the blessing of Trump and the silence or murmured concerns of many western governments. 

Netanyahu claims that the renewed Israeli military offensive is to secure the release of remaining hostages. But Netanyahu’s intention to ethnic cleanse Gaza and its annexation was indicated before the Hamas October 7, 2023, attacks. Brazenly, weeks before October 7, Netanyahu addressed the UN, displaying a map of Israel and an annexed West Bank and Gaza. This was his chillingly named “New Middle East.” Last week, Netanyahu stated his intention to not only defeat Hamas but to also militarily control Gaza and expel Palestinians. Earlier this year, Trump echoed Netanyahu’s plans, when he crassly declared that a Gaza without Palestinians would be excellent “real estate”. 

The Israeli newspaper Haaretz and the London based Financial Times reported in March that the Israeli military has operational plans to completely occupy the Gaza Strip and to displace the population. The Israel cabinet has discussed plans for the mass removal of Palestinians. Days after Trump’s original announcement of his plan to redevelop Gaza as a beach resort, the Israeli defence ministry set up a special unit to organise Palestinians ‘voluntary removal’. This planned ethnic cleansing includes organising “departure to third countries, including securing their movement, establishing movement routes…coordinating the provision of infrastructure that will enable passage by land, sea and air to the destination countries”, according to Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz. 

Since unilaterally breaking the ceasefire, Israel has moved to take control of more than 50 per cent of the Gaza Strip. The Israeli government has expanded its stated military objectives to include seizing large parts of Palestinian territory and turning them into “buffer zones” along the border with Israel. Palestinians are being forced into ever shrinking parcels of land.  The IDF is conducting a military scorched earth policy around the Israeli border with Gaza – torching Palestinian homes and destroying infrastructure and farms. The IDF have carved out in blood a “corridor” dividing Gaza north from south. 

Netanyahu talks of a “large scale evacuation” of the Palestinian population from “combat areas” of Gaza. After his meeting on 7 April with Trump at the White House, Netanyahu boasted that they talked about “countries that might be amenable and are amenable to accepting Palestinians.” 

But where are the disposed and brutalised masses meant to go? Neighbouring Egypt and Jordan refuse to take refugees. The repressive regimes in Cairo and Amman are fully aware of the destabilising presence of the influx of radicalised people into their economically struggling countries and the enormous mass opposition they would face for being seen to cooperate with a new Nakba. For Netanyahu this is of no great concern. He wants to create new ‘facts on the ground’ by forcing a new exodus of Palestinians and possibly the creation of mass refugee camps in and around the borders of Egypt and Jordan and elsewhere. 

The Trump administration shows the bare teeth of US imperialism abroad in its support for Netanyahu’s government and in also trying to maintain influence over the elites in Egypt, Jordan and other Arab regimes, where it faces competition from China and other rising powers. In its quest to dominate the strategically and economically important Middle East, to keep trade routes open and to support its crucial Israel ally, the US has conducted regular missile attacks in Yemen for weeks. US aircraft carriers are stationed near Iran, as Trump states the US has entered initial talks with Tehran over its nuclear arms capability. Israel has conducted missile attacks in Syria and Lebanon in recent days. 

Public revulsion

Even for some of the most staunchly pro-Israel  western governments, the public revulsion at the right wing Israeli government’s war crimes is forcing them to make at least half-hearted public criticisms of Tel Aviv. David Lammy, the UK foreign secretary, finally admitted in Parliament that Israel’s blockade on Gaza was a “breach of international law.” Lammy had to also condemn the expulsion of two Labour MPs from Israel who were due to take part in a ‘fact finding’ mission in the West Bank. But Keir Starmer’s government continues to send weapons to Israel. British export components for the F-16 and F-35 fighter jets are used by Israel to conduct its bombing campaigns. The British and US governments and other powers sending arms and financial aid to Israel, are complicit in mass murder and ethnic cleansing. On 7 April a war crimes complaint against 10 British nationals accused of committing war crimes for the Israeli military in Gaza was handed to the Metropolitan Police. The report by the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights and the Public Interest Law Centre accused the ten of crimes including murder, extermination, attacking civilians and the deportation or forcible transfer of a population.  

The organised workers’ movement internationally must make every effort to stop the IDF attacks on Gaza and the monstrous plans for ethnic cleansing. Most workers’ movements correctly call for the immediate ending of the barbaric siege of Gaza and the occupation of all the Palestinian territories, and for permanent withdrawal of the Israeli military from those areas. Building workers’ actions, wherever possible, in support of those demands is needed, beyond those that have already taken place. 

 Two weeks ago, up to one million people protested across the US against Trump’s attacks on democratic rights, social programmes, and public sector sackings. The protests also displayed solidarity with the people of Gaza. 

Also, some protest strikes and other actions against the war on Gaza took place last week in a number of countries across the Middle East and a ‘general strike’ was called in the West Bank in solidarity with the Palestinians in Gaza. This can be built on by the trade union activists in the Palestinian Authority, with the establishment of rank and file committees in the workplaces and communities, run democratically.  

Socialists support a revolutionary mass struggle of the Palestinians, under their own democratic control, to fight for national and social liberation. This includes the Palestinian workers and masses building independent parties across all the occupied territories.  

Solidarity action 

 Calls from Palestinian activists have gone out for a “worldwide general strike” – the “world stops for Gaza.” Where trade union leaders are not responding with any type of solidarity action, rank and file activists should call on them to do so. And where this is not forthcoming workers can themselves organise practical solidarity with the benighted people of Gaza. 

Speechifying and signing letters against the horrors in Gaza is not nearly enough action by trade union leaders, including left union leaders. Global workers’ solidarity and industrial action can stop the production and transport of weapons to the Israeli state that are used to indiscriminately massacre Palestinians. The international workers’ movement is best placed to impose a successful boycott on Israeli big business and Israeli state bodies that are involved in the occupation and repression in the Palestinian territories. Alongside continuing mass demonstrations and protests and other actions, organised workplace action can deal a blow to the plans of Netanyahu and Trump, and to those other western powers aiding and abetting Israel’s wars. 

Inside Israel, Netanyahu’s position is not at all secure. Protests have taken place against the renewed war on Gaza. Relatives of hostages have castigated him for putting the lives of hostages at stake. Netanyahu is facing multiple court charges. His coalition government is constantly in danger of fracturing. The prime minister sacked Ronen Bar, the head of Shin Bet, the domestic intelligence service, but the courts have said Bar must remain in the job until they rule on his dismissal. A new scandal, Qatargate, is rocking Netanyahu’s government. It is alleged that close political advisors of the Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and a lieutenant colonel in the reserves, were paid for promoting the interests of the government of Qatar, which has sponsored Hamas. 

Such scandals fuel the opposition to Netanyahu in Israel and the calls for an end to the Gaza conflict. For the Israeli anti-war movement to develop, it needs to adopt independent class politics and to cut all ties with bourgeois parties and politicians. Furthermore, a developing mass movement in Israel will need to break with the ruling right wing Zionist ideology and to assert the right of Palestinians to self-determination. Only the realisation of Palestinian statehood, on a socialist basis, free of all coercion and outside powers’ meddling, can end the wars and instability, for all. This can only be achieved by breaking with capitalism. The Israeli working class needs to forge its own independent party, with a socialist policies, to take on right wing parties that only offer endless war, insecurity and lowering living standards. Such a party can forge class links with Palestinians  in the West Bank and Gaza and with other workers across the region and break the hold of right wing forces across the region.

The CWI argues that genuine and permanent Palestinian freedom can only be won as part of a struggle for class unity against oppression and the bosses’ exploitation. This poses the struggle for a completely different society – a socialist society. Workers’ governments in Israel, Palestine and the region would set about the reorganization of society, bringing the economies into the hands of the working masses. Planned and managed economies, on democratic lines, would be for the benefit of all, transforming living conditions. Under socialism, the Palestinian and Israeli populations could agree their future relations in a free and democratic manner – in two socialist states (an independent socialist Palestinian state, alongside a socialist Israel) or in some other arrangement, should they wish, as part of a socialist confederation, on a voluntary basis, with guaranteed rights for all minorities. 

 The CWI is fighting for:
• An immediate end to the attacks on Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem
• Withdrawal of all Israeli military forces from the Palestinian territories, Lebanon and Syria
• Immediate lifting of the blockade on Gaza
• Release of all Palestinian political prisoners and Israeli hostages
• The right of Palestinians to resist repression and aggression. A mass Palestinian struggle to fight for genuine national and social liberation. The establishment of popular, democratically controlled committees to lead the struggle, with the right to provide armed defence
• The right to national self-determination for the Palestinian people, including forming an independent Palestinian state
• Building of direct links between workers on both sides of the national divide
• Building of democratic and independent workers’ parties in both the Palestinian territories and Israel
• There will be no peace and liberation under capitalism and imperialism! Real national and social liberation can be achieved on a lasting basis through socialist change. For a socialist Israel alongside a socialist Palestine, with two capitals in Jerusalem and full rights for minorities, while recognising that workers’ and oppressed peoples’ organisations will democratically negotiate and decide the state boundaries and forms  
• A struggle by the masses of the Arab states against the dictatorial capitalist Arab ruling elites. For a voluntary socialist confederation of the Middle East 

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