End the genocidal war against Palestinians!

A Statement by the Committee for Revolutionary International Regroupment (CRIR)

The rebellion in Gaza is the revolt of a people who have been dispossessed of their land and subjected to countless acts of carnage since 1948. The Palestinians have the absolute right to revolt, to resist and to fight with all the resources at their disposal to defeat their oppressors.

Israel was created in 1948 by the USA and the main powers of the world to create in the Middle East a bulwark to control oil wealth as well as a garrison state, based on the ideology of Zionism, to use against the Arab masses who, inhabiting a number of different countries, pose a powerful threat to imperialist domination of the region. The alibi was that the Jews, whom we socialists defend against attacks by Nazis and anti-Semites, would have a country of their own to live in peace.

Nothing could be further from the truth. The Zionist state of Israel stripped the Palestinians of their land and grew by stealing territories from its neighbors. They reduced the Palestinians they did not kill or banish to semi-slavery, subject to systematic violence. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians expelled from their homes have sought refuge in the West Bank, Gaza, and numerous refugee camps in surrounding countries.

Even the BBC, a British media outlet, quoted the Human Rights Watch which claims that Gaza is “the world’s largest open-air prison.” It is just 41km long and between 6 and 12km wide, yet it is home to 2.1 million souls, 600,000 of whom live crammed into eight precarious refugee camps.

In reality, Gaza is a concentration camp, but BBC does not use those words so as not to complete the sentence: that Israel acts with the Palestinians as the Nazis acted with the Jews.

This history is the source of the Hamas attack against Israeli citizens that began on October 7.

Since 2007 Israel has kept Gaza under a blockade. The BBC reports that this “has brought Gaza’s economy to the brink of collapse, with unemployment rates above 40%, according to the World Bank,” adding that the World Food Program considers 63% of Gaza’s population to be “food insecure.” Now starvation is on the horizon with Israel’s relentless bombing campaign and the almost total food and medicine blockade, as well as the cut-off of electricity, water shortages, and the destruction of many hospitals.

Against this backdrop, the violence of oppressed Palestinians is different than the Zionist state terrorism of Israel and its imperialist supporters. While we do not agree politically with Hamas, an Islamic fundamentalist religious organization, we realize it is a product of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory, while the state of Israel is a tool of the U.S.

Only when there is a secular, democratic and non-racist state made up of Arabs and Jews, and the end of the Zionist state of Israel, will there be any possibility of working toward true peace in the region.