October 30, 2023 editorial of the New Anti-capitalist Party (NPA) in France, translated from French.
Since last weekend, the Israeli army has taken barbarity to a whole new level, and is now carrying out military ground incursions into the Gaza Strip, while stepping up the bombardments. Homes are in ruins and thousands of civilians are dead or under rubble. The strikes have hit towns much further south, where, with enormous cynicism, Israeli army officials have ordered the population to take refuge. For Israeli leaders are not just fighting Hamas. They want to terrorize the entire Palestinian population so that, if their war succeeds in destroying Hamas, they can smother any hint of self-organization. Like all imperialist leaders, they claim to be attacking regimes, but it’s the population they’re massacring.
An international solidarity movement that Darmanin wants to stifle in France!
On Saturday October 28, the planned demonstration in Paris was once again banned by the local government under the pretext that the demonstration would support terrorism or anti-Semitism. But solidarity with the Palestinians, many of whom have experienced Hamas’s dictatorship first-hand, is not support for this power. Just as denouncing Zionist colonial policy is not anti-Semitism. Thousands of workers, young people and families took to the streets again across France this weekend, despite the fines, the harassment of demonstrators in Paris and the hours in police custody of Nicole Ziani, representative of the Association France-Palestine in Nîmes. They have added their voices to those of others, from London to New York, New Zealand, Turkey and Indonesia, who have expressed their indignation and rage at the massacre perpetrated in Gaza. In Israel, too, voices are being raised to denounce the government’s war-mongering policy – a government who very much want to make people forget the massive protests against its policy in the last months.
Unite, mobilize against the massacre in Gaza, against colonization!
The people of Palestine will find their salvation neither thanks to the imperialist powers, nor through organizations like Hamas, which has in no way implemented an emancipation project since it took control of the Gaza Strip – quite the contrary! A large part of the Palestinian population belongs to the working class. Their plight resonates in the hearts of workers in Algeria, Lebanon and here in France. The struggle to halt the Israeli army’s bombardment and incursion into the Gaza Strip goes hand in hand with the anti-colonialist struggle against the State of Israel.
Workers and young people, we need to organize to build the movement that will make it possible to defeat Netanyahu in Israel, and the warlike, anti-social policies of the governments of the imperialist states that support him, including Macron’s!
In the coming days, and again in Paris on Saturday November 4, many of us will be demonstrating our support for the Palestinian people! Stop the massacre in Gaza! We will not be deterred from expressing our international solidarity as workers!
