One year on - End Israeli terror

By:

Sid Lacombe

October 7, 2024

In the past year the Israeli state has bombed Gaza, Lebanon, The West Bank, Syria, Yemen, Iraq and Iran killing tens of thousands of people with full backing of the US, Canada, UK and members of the EU.

They have committed war crimes on a scale never seen before. Each hour brings new horrors as Israel uses 2000 pound bombs on civilian targets in Gaza and Lebanon.

The long-expected invasion of Lebanon is partly about saving Benjamin Netanyahu’s political career by appeasing the far-right that props up his government. It is also about using the particular moment — during the chaos of the Gaza genocide — to expand Israel’s territory in Lebanon, Gaza and the West Bank.

Gaza Genocide

The Israelis have been allowed to carry out a genocide against the people of Gaza while states around the world turn a blind eye.

U.N. Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese stated, “The overwhelming nature and scale of Israel’s assault on Gaza and the destructive conditions of life it has inflicted reveal an intent to physically destroy Palestinians as a group.”

They have engineered a famine in Gaza by severely restricting aid deliveries. A document issued by the Office of the Human Rights Commissioner was blunt,

“Israel has been starving 2.3 million Palestinian people at a speed never witnessed in modern history. Never have this many civilians been made to go hungry so quickly and completely with the first reported deaths of children by starvation dating back to January 2024. Today, all of Gaza is in famine, a situation which will have irreversible consequences especially for children. But even if the conflict were to end today, food systems in Gaza are in shatters. At least one third of Gaza’s agricultural lands, the fishing fleet and irrigation systems are destroyed. In Gaza, starvation is being used as a weapon of war, which has unleashed violence at a genocidal scale.”

A recent report from the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet has revealed that the death toll in Gaza may be much higher than previously estimated.

The Lancet has done studies like this before. For example, they released a comprehensive report investigating the numbers of dead in Iraq after the US invasion in 2003.

They count not just the people who have been killed by direct fire but also those who die because of lack of medical treatment or by disease caused by the conditions of the war.

They estimate that as many as 186,000 Palestinians, or eight percent of the population, may have been killed in the past 9 months. That is likely a conservative estimate.

The complete destruction of the main hospitals is key to the research and findings but they also took into account things like the spread of infectious diseases—made worse by the destruction of sanitation infrastructure. Cleaning supplies are banned from going into the strip and so these shortages continue to grow more acute.

Israels plan is to conduct a larger war to cement their authority in the region and expand territories. It is they and the US who are responsible for the spiral of violence and the expansion of the war.

The Trudeau government insists that Israel has a right to defend itself. The reality is that under international law, Israel has obligations as the occupying power or the power that exerts effective control of Palestinian lands, to maintain conditions for life and security.

Palestinians under occupation do have a right to resist—including the use of armed struggle—to defend themselves.

Imperialism

The Israeli state enjoys endless support from the Western Imperialists because it is a linchpin in the project to control the region.

An editorial in Israeli newspaper Haaretz in 1952 summarized what Israel means to Imperialism:

“Israel is to become the watchdog. There is no fear that Israel will undertake any aggressive Policy towards the Arab states when this would explicitly contradict the wishes of the US and Britain. But if for any reasons the Western powers should sometimes prefer to close their eyes, Israel could be relied upon to punish one or several neighbouring states whose discourtesy to the West went beyond the bounds of the permissible.”

This is why all the stories we hear about the Democrats in the US trying to curtail Israeli actions are false. They have no intention of stopping the zionists.

Indeed if they did it would be a simple matter to shut off weapons shipments and financial aid to the Israelis. Instead the US recently announced another $8 billion in assistance to Israel.

And so the larger conflict that Netanyahu wants is likely.

Canada

The Canadian government also continues its blanket support for Israel.

The NDP is trying to pressure Trudeau and has called for recognition of the Palestinian state, sanctions on the Netanyahu government and an immediate arms embargo in wake of the Lebanon attacks.

This is a good start and is worthy of support. Any time we can push a government to end its support for Israel and further isolate the state, that is a positive step.

But there will never be peace in the region while the Israeli state exists. It’s an ethno-nationalist project that needs to be dismantled.

That means that our movement is stabbing at the very heart of Western Imperialism.

The Gaza genocide and subsequent wider war is a central fault-line in our world today and is reshaping political consciousness on a mass scale. The direction of the struggle will have repercussions for decades to come.

This will require us to deepen our movement in workplaces and among community and activist groups.

Israel’s aggression is a sign of its weakness and the relative decline of US power globally. US power has never seemed weaker. They were beaten in iraq and Afghanistan and watch as rivals grow as economic powers that challenge their position at the top of the imperial pecking order.

One year on from the resistance rebellion we see the state of Israel losing its legitimacy by the day. A recent poll in Canada showed that a majority now have an unfavourable opinion of the zionist state.

We in Canada have a specific role to play to further weaken that Western bloc. We need to both call for an arms embargo today and build towards the end of capitalism — a system that means endless war.

Tags:

Palestine