The Spark

the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist

“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx

Gaza and the Warsaw Ghetto

Nov 13, 2023

Right now, an army claiming to represent the Jewish people is invading, bombarding, and besieging what amounts to a giant ghetto, where food, water, and electricity have been cut off. That ghetto, Gaza, is an area of 17 square miles filled with 2.2 million Palestinian people who cannot gain access to their old homeland or citizenship in it because of their religion and ethnicity.

Eighty years ago, we might switch the names of a few groups and be referring to the Warsaw ghetto in Poland. The Nazis crammed 460,000 Jews into a 1.3 square mile section of that city. In the end, at least 390,000 of them were killed, most in the death camp at Treblinka.

We might not be quite there yet in Gaza, but the logic of nationalism, used by the dominant capitalist powers to suck wealth out of every corner of the globe, has once again set people to push in this direction.