EDITORIAL
Not in Our Name!
Stop the Massacre in Gaza!

Oct 30, 2023

Since October 7, terror has fallen on Palestinians in the thin strip of land called Gaza. Homes, hospitals, UN-administered schools, mosques, churches ... the two-and-a-half million inhabitants have nowhere to shelter from the bombardments. Nowhere to get food, water, fuel, or medicine.

With more than 7,700 dead and 19,000 injured as of October 28, entire neighborhoods razed, and hospitals overwhelmed, the tragedy unfolds before the eyes of the world. This is a policy of blind vengeance on the part of the Israeli State, and it is being done in the name of the entire Israeli population. Nothing can justify such an act.

Friday, October 27, saw the heaviest bombardment yet in this three-week-long series of attacks. The bombardment included “bunker-buster” bombs—supposedly aimed at collapsing the network of tunnels Hamas had built under Gaza. No one knows if they reached the tunnels. But what we do know, and what cannot be denied, is that the bombs did destroy all the buildings on top of the ground, killing or injuring anyone still in them. And what we do know is that the U.S. paid for these bombs.

Israel had ordered all civilians in the North—that is, over one million people—to evacuate to the south of Gaza—now it treats everyone left in the North as enemy combatants. In fact, that evacuation has been next to impossible. Israel bombed southern Gaza after announcing that evacuation would allow civilians to be safe!

Under cover of this bombardment, the Israeli army carried out an unannounced ground invasion. The Gaza Health Ministry has said that over 400 Palestinians were killed in the first several hours of the invasion. The area is now in darkness, with electricity and phone service severed.

How far will Israel take this invasion? The future of Palestinians and Israelis will be determined by these events for decades to come. The future of the whole Middle East depends on them. And who can be sure that this conflict will not set the planet ablaze?

The carnage perpetrated today in Gaza is done with the complicity and the full approval of all the imperialist powers. U.S. imperialism is managing the genocide, giving the Israeli military “advice” and using its firepower to “contain” the Gaza killing zone. There is nothing astonishing in this: the U.S. has never prevented Israel from the systematic oppression of Palestinians, whether they live in Gaza, in the West Bank, or in Israel.

For decades, the U.S., at the head of all the Western powers, has made the State of Israel its armed enforcer in the region to prevent the different peoples of the region from fulfilling their aspirations to live together with each other in peace and in countries not controlled against them.

And, of course, there is oil—the reason U.S. imperialism, along with French and British, moved into the Middle East in the first place.

U.S. imperialism and its allies have created an explosive situation in the whole region. In this oil-rich Middle East, they have imposed their domination by carving into the flesh of peoples, relying on the most reactionary monarchies and dictatorships, like that of Saudi Arabia. And when those regimes do not fall in line enough, they crush them, as they did in Iraq.

Today, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Lebanon, Jordan, Iran, and Yemen are ticking social bombs as well, with tens of millions of poor people in as desperate a situation as the Palestinians. In a tinderbox where the slightest spark can cause a blast, the U.S. let Netanyahu play with fire.

Hope can only come from the peoples of the region themselves. It will come from those who rise up against imperialism and its maneuvers. It will come from those who understand the need to fight capitalism and the big bourgeoisie. And from the U.S. working class when it recognizes that the same imperialism has its foot on our throat as well.

Overthrowing imperialism to establish an egalitarian society, free of exploitation and relations of domination, is the only way out for humanity. This perspective is the opposite of nationalist policies aimed at defending the interests of one people at the expense of others—the opposite of Netanyahu’s policy in Israel, but also of Hamas’ policy in Palestine. It is the opposite of the policies that U.S. imperialism engineers in our name.

Only a union of the workers of all countries against the world’s leaders will be able to break the vicious cycle of war they’re dragging us into.