Gaza:
The Dirty War and Those Who Say No

Dec 2, 2024

This article is translated from the November 29 issue of Lutte Ouvriere (Workers’ Struggle), the Trotskyist group of that name active in France.

The Israeli army is facing increasing defections among the 300,000 reservists mobilized against the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, and now in Lebanon.

Before the start of the all-out war launched by Netanyahu following the attack on October 7, 2023, Israelis under the age of 40 performed an average of 25 reserve days spread over three years. Over the past year, this figure has risen to 135 days for soldiers and 168 days for officers. Reservists complain of not seeing their children, of putting their jobs or small businesses at risk, of having to interrupt their studies.

And above all, these periods of reserve duty are taking place in the context of a dirty war of occupation being waged on an entire people. Over the past year, 800 Israeli soldiers have been killed, 5,400 wounded and 12,000 are being treated for post-traumatic stress. There are a growing number of testimonies from reservists, soldiers and engineers: they remain scarred after having crushed Palestinians, dead or alive, under their machines or having participated, in one form or another, in exactions.

Added to these horrors of war is the injustice felt by many reservists in exempting 63,000 young ultra-Orthodox Israelis from military service, on the pretext that they are devoting themselves to their religious studies. Netanyahu, needing too much the votes of the deputies of the ultra-Orthodox Jewish fundamentalist parties, refuses to put an end to this provision and is preparing to lengthen the duration of military service.

The Israeli state has turned its population into prison guards, and today into the executioners of a people. There will be no peace without a break with the Netanyahu government’s infamous colonialism.