October 9, 2023 editorial of the New Anti-capitalist Party (NPA) in France, translated from French.
In the wake of the indiscriminate attack by Hamas on Israeli territory, which has left almost 900 people dead and 2,000 wounded, all the governments of the rich countries, including those of the United States and France, are affirming their support for Israel and its far-right government led by Netanyahu. Hamas in no way fights for social justice and the emancipation of peoples. It is a reactionary and obscurantist organization, sometimes used by Israeli governments and supported by others just as oppressive, such as the Islamic Republic of Iran. The Israeli government is now promising to make the Palestinian people, whom the State of Israel has colonized for decades, pay “an unprecedented price” and is blaming them for Hamas’s policies.
The over-equipped Israeli army’s response promises to be far bloodier: by Monday evening, the death toll in Gaza was already close to 700, with thousands more injured and homeless… 500 buildings have been destroyed in this overcrowded, besieged ghetto, where the Palestinian population lives in misery. And that’s only the beginning: the Israeli Defense Minister has ordered the cutting off of water, gas and electricity, declaring that he was fighting “animals.” And the French state would like to silence those who denounce the hell experienced by the people of Gaza. Our unconditional solidarity is with the Palestinian people, who for 75 years have known nothing but forced migration, military repression, the ghettos of Gaza and the West Bank, and misery.
Israeli civilians, victims of Hamas attacks and rockets, suffer the consequences of decades of their state’s racist, segregationist and colonialist policies. Of all the people lining up behind Netanyahu today, who shouted to denounce “terrorism” when, last May, the Israeli air force bombed the Gaza Strip, destroying a hundred buildings and leaving 2,500 people homeless? Who protested when Israeli bulldozers destroyed Palestinian homes in the West Bank to make way for new Israeli settlements? And what do they say about Israeli reprisals against civilians in Gaza?
Netanyahu has been challenged for months in Israel by massive demonstrations against his regime and his authoritarian plans to amend the Constitution. But they have been confined to defending the democratic rights of Israeli citizens alone. Apart from a small minority of opponents of Israeli state racism, these demonstrations have not defended the rights of Palestinians, nor denounced the misery in Gaza and the West Bank, or the military colonization operations in territories officially granted to the Palestinian people.
As long as these people are locked up in ghettos in Gaza and the West Bank, as long as they suffer destruction, occupation and massacres, the Israeli people too will continue to live in a permanent state of war. A people that oppresses another cannot be free! Yet Netanyahu is trying to get everyone to support him, and to widen the bloody gulf between peoples.
Today, international solidarity must be expressed against his colonialist policies. An international solidarity that will bring the Palestinians out of their isolation and encourage the Israeli working class and youth to break with their state and its racist Zionist policy.
