Jewish leaders say student encampment anti-Semitism accusations are false / by Henry Millstein

_{^{Student protesters demanding a ceasefire in Gaza and divestment from companies supporting the Israeli state are confronted by police on the campus of California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt, in Arcata, Calif., April 22, 2024. Accusations by law enforcement that the protest was anti-Semitic are disputed by local Jewish leaders. | Andrew Goff / Lost Coast Outpost via AP}}

_{Reposted from Peoples World}

ARCATA, Calif.—Local Jewish leaders, including two rabbis and a synagogue president, issued a statement May 3 denying that the recent demonstration at Cal Poly Humboldt against the Israeli war on Gaza was anti-Semitic.

The statement was a response to a press release by Senate President pro-Tempore Mike McGuire (D-North Coast) and Assembly Speaker pro-Tempore Jim Wood (D-Healdsburg) that included a claim the demonstration was characterized by “anti-Semitic hate speech.”

The Jewish leaders, while admitting that there have been anti-Semitic incidents in the area, insisted, “We do not find the protests themselves to be anti-Semitic, and we reject it as justification for the police force used against the protesters.”

The latter statement referred to the assault against the protesters the preceding Tuesday morning by around 100 police from a variety of jurisdictions, who broke up the encampment at Cal Poly Humboldt and arrested 32 people, including a faculty member and a reporter from a local radio station.

The Jewish leaders also pointed out, “This inappropriate justification is all the more problematic because it was done without any consultation with Jewish community leaders.”

Their statement concluded with a warning of “the risks of potential harm and escalation that come from a politicized use of the term anti-Semitism” and an assurance that they would like to work with lawmakers directly “to address these complex problems and the nuances required for future communications.”

Signatories to the statement included Rabbi Naomi Steinberg, Lecturer Emerita Cal Poly Humboldt; Rabbi Bob Rottenberg; Courtney Ladika, M.D., Temple Beth El President; Caroline Connor, M.D., M.P.H., Temple Beth El Vice President; Emeritus Professor Ann Alter, Temple Beth El Board Secretary; and David Boyd, Temple Beth El Antisemitism Task Force.

_{We hope you appreciated this article. At}_{People’s World}_{, we believe news and information should be free and accessible to all, but we need your help. Our journalism is free of corporate influence and paywalls because we are totally reader-supported. Only you, our readers and supporters, make this possible. If you enjoy reading}_{People’s World}_{and the stories we bring you, please}_{support our work by donating or becoming a monthly sustainer today}_{. Thank you!}

_{Hank Millstein is a long-time peace and labor activist. He’s a fiction writer and journalist and a member of the National Writers Union.}

‘Nazi Town, USA’: Not far from here / by Michael Berkowitz

_{^{PBS American Experience}}

_{Reposted from the People’s World}

Director Peter Yost’s new documentary Nazi Town, USA is a timely reminder of how fragile American democracy has always been. Yost’s movie for the PBS American Experience film series uses the brief history of The German-American Bund to show us how this threat is never far below the surface of everyday life…even and especially today.

Fascist ideas are hardly new to America. The earliest colonists brought with them the building blocks of authoritarianism embedded in their notions of religious-based cultural and ethnic superiority. This vision was bolstered by the assumption of rule by the few over the benighted many. The never-ending quest to set up a predominant religion always seeded the path toward fascism.

Building on these first religious and nativist elements, the Ku Klux Klan was the earliest widespread organized racist movement. The Klan was originally established by ex-Confederate soldiers to kill and terrorize Blacks, largely in the post-Civil War South. Later iterations of the KKK grew to impose Jim Crow laws and ethnic and race-based crimes against Blacks, Jews, Catholics, other racial minorities, and immigrants.

Yost’s film describes how more recent organizational attempts to establish white supremacist and fascist rule occurred during the turbulent 20th century period between the two World Wars. As the Great Depression of the 1930s rattled the foundations of American democracy, large groups of citizens sought diverse solutions to the crises of capitalism. A fascist-inspired movement drew on these unresolved early prejudices to offer right-wing solutions. The religious and social authoritarian strains were expressed in the direct violence of Jim Crow law enforcement and the hardly more subtle economic and political sanctions of deep-rooted religious-based anti-Semitism.

During this time, there was a proliferation of influential right-wing individuals and groups. Radio preacher Charles Coughlin attracted 14 million daily listeners preaching that Jews were threatening American civilization. Business leader and car manufacturer Henry Ford promoted virulent anti-Semitism as he sold America’s most popular automobiles. The pseudo-science of eugenics swept the nation advising that biologically inferior races undermined American greatness.

Out of this welter of fear and ignorance emerged a group calling itself “Friends of New Germany.” German Americans in particular had tried to salvage ethnic pride after Germany’s ignominious loss in World War I. Some of them did so by supporting the fascism emerging in Europe as a solution to what they viewed as the chaos of competing ethnic, race, and social groups.

**_{Members of the German-American Bund on the march in New York in the 1930s. | Photo via PBS American Experience}**

Founded under the oversight of German leader Adolf Hitler’s deputy, Rudolph Hess, the Friends of New Germany were the uniformed arm of Germany in the United States. They tried to take over aspects of German-American life in the U.S., pushing pro-Nazi propaganda both within and beyond the German-American community. They boycotted businesses and infiltrated other organizations to promote laws, policies, youth camps, social programs, and other groups that carried a strong pro-Nazi agenda. They demanded a strong leader who was white and Christian.

Nazi Town, USA is the story of how the Friends of New Germany morphed into the German-American Bund. They sought to exterminate Jews, first by marginalizing them in the larger society. The Bund organized marches to terrorize Jewish neighborhoods and physically assaulted Jews, particularly the children. They sought to push out and close the door to other immigrants in their newly adopted country.

President Roosevelt urged the Federal Bureau of Investigation to investigate and take action against the German-American Bund. But FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover decided to tolerate the Bund, as he wanted to focus instead on the Communist Party, which had been so effective in helping workers organize.

The culmination of Bund power was a huge march and rally of 20,000 Nazi supporters in Madison Square Garden in New York in February 1939. Speakers on the platform excoriated Jews as parasites while Jewish demonstrators were beaten and thrown out by Nazi guards.

Bund leader Fritz Kuhn had promised the rally they would Make America Great. But New York Mayor La Guardia’s investigation of the Bund found that Kuhn wanted to make himself great instead. He had been using Bund monies to pay for mistresses across the country. Found guilty of grand larceny, forgery, embezzlement, and tax evasion, German-American Bund leader Kuhn was sent to Sing Sing Penitentiary.

With the failure of its leadership and the onset of World War II’s conflict with Germany, the Bund collapsed. Still, the ideas upon which the Bund was built—the nativist urge to establish a white Christian authoritarian government—continue to feed on the same fear, racism, and greed. Peter Yost’s film does a great service in reminding us about the motives and consequences of those who proclaim they want to Make America Great Again.

Nazi Town, USA premieres on Tuesday, Jan. 23, on PBS. Please consult your local station to confirm the exact viewing time.

_{We hope you appreciated this article. At People’s World, we believe news and information should be free and accessible to all, but we need your help. Our journalism is free of corporate influence and paywalls because we are totally reader-supported. Only you, our readers and supporters, make this possible. If you enjoy reading People’s World and the stories we bring you, please support our work by donating or becoming a monthly sustainer today. Thank you!}

_{Michael Berkowitz, a veteran of the civil rights and anti-war movements, has been Land Use Planning Consultant to the government of China for many years. He taught Chinese and American History at the college level, worked with Eastern Kentucky Welfare Rights Org. with miners, and was an officer of SEIU.}

The Anatomy of Zionist Genocide / by Yoav Litvin

_{^{Image by Taylor Brandon}}

Reposted from Counterpunch

On October 7, Hamas fighters breached the Gaza prison fence, launching a coordinated attack on at least seven Israeli military installations and more than 20 surrounding residential communities. Over 1000 Israeli citizens, both civilian and military, as well as dozens of foreign nationals, were killed in the attack. Some 240 others were taken captive. Caught off guard and in disarray, the Israeli military responded to the attack in a frenzy, firing indiscriminately on breached localities, slaying Israeli captives alongside Hamas fighters in the process. It took the Israeli forces nearly a day to recapture all lost territory and secure the Gaza perimeter.

Following Hamas’s unprecedented incursion, Israel’s public relations apparatus launched a misinformation campaign aimed at inciting fear and fury and began to spread unverified atrocity propaganda. The campaign, involving tales of babies being “beheaded en masse”, “burned” and “hung on a clothesline”, helped transform the Israeli public’s shock into genocidal tribalism and diverted attention from Israel’s political, intelligence and military blunders that paved the way for the attack in the first place. The campaign also helped the government garner crucial public support for mass mobilisation of reserve units which made the consequent full-scale ground invasion of the Gaza Strip possible.

After securing unconditional military, political and diplomatic backing of its imperial sponsors in the West, most notably in Washington, and under the pretext of countering Hamas and rescuing captives, Israel then initiated what has since been accurately described as an AI-guided “mass assassination campaign” in Gaza.

Ten weeks on, most of Gaza is now destroyed, nearly 20,000 Palestinians are dead with many more still under the rubble, and the world continues to watch a genocide unfold in real time. Examining these events through a behavioural-neuroscientific lens could offer insights into the Zionist settler colonialist dynamic in general and the particular motivations behind Israel’s current genocidal acts in Gaza, as well as potential paths forward.

The pillars of Zionist propaganda

In response to historical trauma, Jewish people have a deep fear of anti-Semitism. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, this fear, along with disdain for oppressors, led to the formation of autonomous Jewish self-defence groups in various geographies.

Zionism, a European colonial movement, recognised the potential of this dynamic. It syncretised Jewish longing for safety and self-defence with white supremacist, messianic and fascistic ideologies. This synthesis birthed a new, nationalist Jewish identity that equates Jewish safety with the construction of an exclusivist homeland in Palestine through the displacement of the region’s Indigenous populations.

Settler colonial endeavours typically depend on depicting the targeted territory as “uninhabited”, and its existing inhabitants as inhuman barbarians unworthy of any land.

This portrayal allowed Zionists to displace the Indigenous population of Palestine without moral qualms, portraying the establishment of Israel not as the destruction of a people but as the construction of a “villa in the jungle”.

Within the Israeli society grounded in land and resource theft, offensive aggression under the guise of “self-defence” (as in “Israel Defence Force”) has been rewarded and reinforced from the very beginning and consequently became a routine part of life. By reinstating fear and hijacking trauma associated with past and present negative experiences of Jewish people, Zionist leaders ensured the settler population’s continued support for aggressive, expansionist, hegemonic, genocidal policies and shielded their corruption and other criminal endeavours from public scrutiny.

To maintain Israel’s violently oppressive status quo and expand the territory of the settler colony, Zionists opportunistically conflated their colonial ideology with Judaism.

Citing divine dispensation, radical, far-right settlers have been encouraged to seize hilltops on Palestinian land, expel those living there, and form illegal outposts. These outposts are later fortified by the Israeli military and eventually “legalised” by the Zionist state.

Beyond justifying violent land theft, the conflation of Zionism and Judaism serves to delegitimise Indigenous resistance by equating any criticism of Zionism or Israel’s policies towards the Palestinians as an attack on Jews. Further, it hinders anticolonial resistance by portraying a political struggle over land and resources between occupying settlers backed by imperial forces and an Indigenous-occupied people as a supposed ancient religious “conflict” between equals.

This conflation encourages Zionist appropriation and exceptionalisation of Jewish victimhood. Israeli hasbara presents the Holocaust as an unparalleled genocide, granting Jews special victim status. This narrative justifies privileges, discounts and allowances for Israel as the “Jewish state” constructed to ensure the safety of Jews, at the expense of Indigenous Palestinians. Notably, Zionist revisionism often neglects and downplays Nazi crimes against other oppressed groups, including communists, socialists, Roma, disabled individuals, LGBTQI and African Germans.

The liberal wing of Zionism serves to whitewash the reactionary core of the movement and conceal its true objectives – expansionism and apartheid. Misleadingly, Liberal Zionists portray Zionism as an ideology aligned with democratic, progressive values and human rights, falsely projecting a genuine commitment to peace, justice and full integration into the Middle East.

Fear and genocidal fervour

Until October 7, Israel upheld its founding aspiration, enforcing a doctrine of endless occupation while oscillating between implicit and explicit forms of genocide, the latter often described as “mowing the lawn” in reference to Israel’s periodical attacks on Gaza since its 2005 “withdrawal” from the besieged Palestinian enclave. During this time, Israeli Zionists reaped the benefits of Palestinian land and its resources in a modern, affluent, supposedly democratic consumer paradise, fostering robust connections and identification with white US and Europe and oil/cash-rich Gulf monarchies, rather than its immediate neighbours.

On October 7, intense fear and shock gripped Israeli society, presenting Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right government with a golden opportunity to quash rising dissent against corruption, and please his coalition membe rs with a genocidal land grab.

Fear in Israel is sustained through militarisation, anti-Palestinian narratives, reframing resistance as “terrorism,” remembering past atrocities, focusing on perceived threats and promoting segregation, ie, apartheid. Chronic fear induces symptoms akin to Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), making the Israeli population prone to aggression masked as “self-defence”.

The toxic mix of fear, dehumanising propaganda, rewards for aggression and intense apartheid has bred a lack of empathy in Israelis toward Palestinians. Despite claiming the Gaza conflict as “self-defence”, Israeli leaders openly blame Palestinian society as a whole, essentially sanctioning collective punishment of civilians. Daily, Israeli institutional leaders mock Palestinian culture and cheerlead the torture, displacement and annihilation of Palestinians, revealing a disturbing genocidal mindset.

The path forward

On October 7, the carefully constructed Zionist facade of incremental genocide within a liberal/democratic framework collapsed, exposing Israel’s genocidal and fascistic core. Zionists in Israel and beyond did not mourn the end of this charade, and instead celebrated their newfound freedom to kill and destroy Palestinians without any restraint or pretence. This development not only poses a threat of elimination to the Palestinian people but since the Occupied Territories are used as a laboratory for the development and testing of new military technology and strategies, it could also set the stage for similar violent escalations against oppressed communities in the Global South as well as against BIPOC and immigrant communities within the Global North.

Israel’s genocidal behaviour in Gaza and elsewhere in historic Palestine resonates with patterns seen in the Stanford prison experiment and the Milgram obedience study. In the latter, individuals, swayed by authority, had administered potentially lethal shocks to other participants.

For Zionists to break their addiction to aggression, they would need to go through a process of deprogramming and decolonisation. This would require them to embrace the truth about the history and nature of Zionism, commit to sincere accountability, recognise the humanity of Palestinians, and empathise with their suffering and plight. Once the oppressive structure, Zionism, is disassembled, it can be effectively dismantled, paving the way for a process of rehumanisation and reconciliation through the use of empathy. Liberation, reconciliation and an end to Israel’s genocidal violence can only be achieved within a steadfast and unwavering anti-Zionist framework that aligns with wider leftist, antiracist, anticolonial values.

_{Dedicated to the late Palestinian poet Refaat Alareer.}

_{This piece first appeared on AlJazeera}.

_{Yoav Litvin is a Doctor of Psychology/ Behavioral Neuroscience. For more info, please visit yoavlitvin.com/about/}

French Communists join massive protest against rise of anti-Semitism / by Roger McKenzie

_{^{Thousands gather for a march against anti-semitism in Paris, France, November 12, 2023 | AP}}

_{Reposted from the People’s World}

French communists turned out in large numbers on Sunday across France to join at least 180,000 people protesting against the rise of anti-Semitism.

In the largest march against anti-semitism in Paris since a 1990 demonstration against the desecration of a Jewish cemetery, about 100,000 took to the streets.

The French Interior Ministry reports that since the surprise Hamas attack on Israel on October 7 and the brutal Israeli retaliation, there have been 1,247 anti-Semitic acts recorded in France.

French President Emmanuel Macron did not attend the march but expressed his support for the protest and called on citizens to rise up against “the unbearable resurgence of unbridled anti-Semitism.”

The French Communist Party (PCF) originally intended to boycott the march if the far-right National Rally (RN), led by Marine Le Pen, were going to take part but decided to march.

But the PCF still slammed the RN’s participation in the march, citing its record of anti-Semitism in a country with the highest Jewish population in Europe.

Paris Senator and PCF spokesman Ian Brossat said on Saturday: “RN leaders are not welcome at the march against anti-Semitism.

“Even today, the far-right is fighting against the Gayssot Law which allows racist, anti-semitic, and Holocaust denial remarks to be condemned.”

The 1990 Gayssot Law makes it an offense in France to question the existence or size of crimes against humanity.

PCF Secretary General Fabien Roussel said: “It was communists who made it possible to condemn anti-semitic Holocaust denial and racist remarks. The far right has always fought to repeal it.”

He said: “How can they demonstrate against anti-semitism at the same time?”

Ms. Le Pen dismissed critics, saying that she and her party were “exactly where we need to be.”

But France Unbowed leader Jean-Luc Melenchon stayed away from the march, saying last week on the X social media site that it would be a meeting of “friends of unconditional supporters for the massacre” in Gaza.

Patrick Klugman, a lawyer and a member of the Freethem committee working to obtain the release of people held by Hamas, said that the large participation in the march is meaningful and symbolic in reassuring Jewish communities in France.

He said: “I am very proud of my country because of this mobilization.

_{Roger McKenzie is the International Editor of Morning Star, Britain’s daily socialist newspaper}

Like the Phoenix, Gaza will Rise from the Fire / by Ronnie Kasrils

_{^{Palestinians in Gaza celebrate the announcement of the ceasefire in May 2023. (Photo: Mahmoud Ajjour, The Palestine Chronicle)}}

_{Reposted from The Palestine Chronicle}

The Palestinian spirit is unbreakable. Like the mythical phoenix, defiant and heroic Gaza will rise from the fire.

The aerial bombardment of Gaza’s most crowded Jabalia refugee camp piles on one massacre after another. It signifies Israeli barbarism and a fascist inability to understand the heroic human spirit to resist repression.

History has shown that the bombing of civilians – from the Basque town of Guernica in 1937 to Soviet and British cities in World War 2, from America’s destruction of Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, to the massacre of Gaza today – strengthens the determination to resist.

As the Israeli state’s inhumane attack on Gaza continues, with the ground-zero onslaught grinding forward, civilians are being killed at a terrifying rate – the ghetto reduced to rubble.

By the end of October, well over 8,000 of the 2.3 million people packed into the walled sliver of land have been killed. The lives of more than 3,500 children have been taken, with women and the elderly accounting for most other deaths. Entire families have been wiped out. Over 20,000 people have been wounded, many with life-threatening injuries. A Palestinian child is being killed every 10 minutes. More children have been butchered in October than in all the world’s conflicts since 2019.

People across Gaza are in unspeakable pain and anguish. People across the world are reeling from television images of frantic parents rushing bloodied infants through shattered hospital wards or people digging through collapsed rubble with their bare hands in search of loved ones.

At this rate of slaughter, over 30,000 people will be killed by Christmas, 40% of them children, 30% women, and 150,000 injured.

Netanyahu and his generals declare that their “war” could last months, so these statistics are not improbable. This is a war crime, a crime against humanity on an unimaginable scale. These crimes are backed by the likes of US President Joe Biden and Britain’s Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and much of the Western media, including Zionist outposts in my own country, South Africa – shamelessly ignoring the disproportionate blood bath Israel has visited on Palestinians.

Announcing the onset of a “total war”, Israel’s Defense Minister, Yoav Gallant, declared in words that will shame Israel for all time: “I have ordered a complete siege of the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel… We are fighting human animals.”

I do not say this lightly, but it is a plain fact that these words could have come from the mouth of a Nazi exterminator.

Seared into collective memory is Gallant’s chilling warning to the 1,1 million in the northern part of the ghetto giving them 24 hours to flee their homes. Thousands of women and children sheltering at Gaza City’s Al Aqsa Hospital, are refusing to leave even under that deadline, for as at Jabalia, there is nowhere to go.

The Gaza population under siege for 16 years, was already suffering borderline starvation with only 500 trucks allowed in each day prior to the current onslaught. After intense pressure, Israel has permitted a trickle of UN relief to deliver food, water and medicine to enter through the Rafah border crossing. No fuel has been allowed. The tiny amount of supplies permitted through Egypt’s border allows Israel to claim it is providing basic necessities while denying sustenance to most people in practice.

It is evident that many will die of thirst and hunger, bereft of care and medication. Already 12 of Gaza’s hospitals have been destroyed and 32 medical centers partially damaged or put out of service. This includes the Al-Ahli Baptist hospital in Gaza City where 500 people died from a direct hit by an Israeli missile. Unlike the missiles used by Israel the rockets used by Hamas or Islamic Jihad don’t have the power to destroy entire buildings. This was another Israeli war crime.

Amidst this devastation there are an estimated 55,000 pregnant women with 5,000 of them close to giving birth. There are 130 babies in incubators and 140 in ICU.

In 1948, when Israeli fascists slaughtered 240 men, women and children in the Deir Yassin village near Jerusalem, its agriculture minister, Aharon Zisling, declared in horror: “We have behaved like Nazis and my whole being is shaken.”

Fascism

The great physicist Albert Einstein, and the philosopher Hannah Arendt, an expert on the Nazis, correctly labelled the architect of that massacre, Menachem Begin, a fascist. He later became Israel’s prime minister. It is an undeniable fact that the government that is raining hell on the people crowded into the Gaza ghetto are proto-fascists driven by a racist myth: They are the chosen people and Palestine is their God-given land.

Israel is a settler colony, that has adopted apartheid practices, and its crimes have been funded and legitimated by the West since its illegitimate birth as a state in the 1948 Nakba. The US has vetoed and undermined UN resolutions and international law from that time through the 1967 occupation of Gaza and the West Bank. Today the West colludes with Israel in its ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, war crimes and aggression against neighboring states.

The US currently provides $3.8 billion per year funding for Israel’s military alone. Biden has now announced a further $14 billion in support for the Israeli military with not a cent of humanitarian aid for Palestinians. The US has dispatched two aircraft carrier groups, with 2,000 marines, to “protect” Israel and has delivered more bombs and missiles for the “defensive” onslaught on Gaza. Israel likely requires an inventory of gas and flame throwers for the ground attack on the vast Hamas tunnel system now underway.

While Western support for Israel is driven by racism, there are also more personal motives at play in some instances.

Sunak’s wealthy family has enormous investments in Israel as do many others on the Zionist bandwagon, including many Western corporations. The claims made in support of Israel by most Western politicians and dutifully echoed by most of the Western media need to be rigorously assessed.

Let’s take the chorus of statements describing Operation Al-Aqsa Flood launched by Hamas on October 7 as ‘unprovoked’ and declaring that ‘Israel has a right to defend itself.

The two-billion-dollar Gaza security fence was breached, and 360 Israeli soldiers and 1,200 settlers killed by Resistance fighters engaged in a liberation struggle against apartheid settler-colonialism – although eye-witness testimony has emerged that scores of Jewish settlers died by indiscriminate shooting from their own side. Those settlers died because the Israeli state failed to protect them from guerrilla fighters who had broken out of perpetual open-air imprisonment.

The action of the mujahedeen takes place within the context of almost eight decades of brutal oppression, going back to the time of the dispossession of their grandparents. The Israeli towns, villages and kibbutzim that they raided were built on land stolen from their very own families in the 1940s, during the Nakba that had cast them into refugee limbo. Indeed, two- thirds of the residents of Gaza are refugees, many from those same destroyed villages.

Western Hypocrisy

Western media commentary has been awash with ‘fake news’. The claim that forty babies had been decapitated has been debunked, and it has emerged, as already stated, that many settlers died owing to frenzied shooting by Israeli soldiers, operating under the military’s ‘Hannibal doctrine’ that death is better than being taken captive by the Resistance.

When the West and its servile media claimed that this attack was ‘unprovoked’ no reference was made to more than the 75 years of ethnic cleansing, incremental genocide and collective punishment; the 16 years siege of Gaza; the five deadly onslaughts on Gaza since 2008, including the cold-blooded assassination of 220 protestors – 42 children among them – and injuring of 36,000 in the peaceful March of Return of 2018-19. Settlers from nearby Sderot ate popcorn and cheered Israeli snipers as they mowed down defenseless people.

Around the world people of conscience remember and celebrate the courage of the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto who rebelled, guns in hand, against Nazi incarceration, prepared to die on their feet rather than passively await death like sheep. Although South Africans were declared to be terrorists when we took up arms against apartheid the armed struggle was widely recognized as wholly legitimate. Armed resistance against military occupation and tyranny is recognized as a universal right in international law and as a moral right in the theory of just war.

Hamas is a national liberation movement, engaged in an anti-colonial struggle. Israel, the USA and the wider West seek to delegitimate Hamas by conflating it with ISIS but this is a wholly bogus comparison. Hamas, unlike ISIS, is a political organization emerging from an occupied and oppressed people with a clear project to end colonial occupation.

The hypocrisy and racial double standards of the West and much of its media has become crudely evident in the difference in the response to the situations in Ukraine and Gaza.

The European Commission President, Ursula von der Leyen, often praising her grandfather who was a Nazi general, has declared that: “Russia’s attacks against civilian infrastructure, especially electricity, in Ukraine is a war crime. Cutting off men, women, children from water, electricity and heating with winter coming – these are acts of pure terror. And we have to call it as such.” However, when Israel does all these things, and worse, it enjoys the enthusiastic support of the West.

Israel’s End Game

We should recall that when Zionism’s 19th Century founder, Theodor Herzl, sought support from European powers, he promised that a “Jewish state” in Palestine, would build an iron wall “against Asian barbarism”. He was offering to securing Western imperialist interests against the Arabs and eastwards, by a European colonial settlement in what for centuries had been a flourishing land called Palestine.

Along with racism, this explains much of the financial, military, diplomatic and servile mainstream media support for Israel. It is an extension of Western imperialism. Oil and gas, including the recent discovery of vast reserves off the coast from Gaza to Lebanon, have compounded the West’s willingness to sacrifice the Palestinian people in its support for a loyal settler colony with shared economic interests.

As Israel rains death and destruction on Gaza we need to ask what its end game is. To answer this question, we must go back to the origins of Zionism, and its desire for great lebensraum at the expense of the Palestinian people – who had cultivated the fields, developed agriculture, trade and towns, and created a thriving culture, from the times of the Canaanite Kingdom.

Herzl explained that “Once in power, we will spirit the penniless Arabs across the borders.” This was the basis for ethnic cleansing of the indigenous people begun by Ben Gurion in 1948 when 750,000 people – three-quarters of the Palestinian population at the time who vastly outnumbered Jews – were forced into exile as refugees. Gaza and the West Bank, seized in Israel’s 1967 war of expansion, created more refugees.

It seems clear that Israel’s objective in levelling Gaza and terrorizing the population is to force the survivors out into refugee camps in the Sinai Desert where they will become Egypt’s responsibility. Along with realizing the avarice for Gaza’s offshore oil and gas fields.

The extreme nature of the crisis in Gaza must not overlook that the West Bank and East Jerusalem are in turmoil. Since the 1993 Oslo Accords, and its mirage of a solution, Zionist expansionism has seen settlers increasing from 250,000 at that time to 700,000 today.

This makes the two-state solution impossible. The desecration of the sacred Al-Aqsa Mosque, with the mob attacks on worshippers and residents of East Jerusalem peaking this year, has compounded the worsening situation. The pogroms launched by illegal settlers screaming “Kill the Arabs” and laying waste to the town of Huwwara have shown the fascist character of the settlers.

Almost 2,000 West Bank Palestinians have been injured and more than 120 killed since October 7, with 200 murdered in the preceding months this year. Those attacks were met by courageous armed resistance in towns such as Jenin, Nablus and Hebron, which has challenged the military occupation.

As popular resistance increased prior to October 7, numerous Israeli army battalions were transferred from Gaza to the West Bank and the number of Palestinians imprisoned (or taken hostage) by Israel has almost doubled to over 6,000, including 200 women and children as young as twelve.

Some 1,600 have been detained without charge or trial. The Israelis being held by Hamas are being offered in exchange for the freeing of those prisoners, held under abominable conditions, and many for longer than Nelson Mandela’s 27 years’ imprisonment.

Israel’s policy is not to negotiate a prisoner exchange. This has been exposed by Qatari and Egyptian mediation for the four women released by Hamas. All indicated they had been well treated although the experience had been traumatic. Another woman, Yasmin Poral, held hostage in kibbutz Be’eri on October 7, explained on Israeli TV that many Israelis had been killed by indiscriminate fire from their own soldiers. She clarified that the house she was sheltering in was destroyed by Israeli tank fire. The interview was swiftly removed from online platforms.

Anti-Fascism is not Anti-Semitism

It is not at all difficult to understand the hatred harbored by Palestinians for Israel given the barbaric treatment they have endured for generations. Any credible analysis of the situation would understand this.

However rational analysis is often made very difficult by the deeply cynical response of declaring criticism of the Israeli state and the settlers it supports as ‘anti-Semitic’. It is deeply offensive for Israeli proto-fascists to misuse the historical oppression of Jews to justify the oppression of Palestine. Nonetheless this tactic has successfully suppressed reasoned discussion in a number of societies and organizations.

In contrast, many Jews, including some courageous citizens of Israel, are deeply opposed to Zionism and to the Israeli state. In the United States large numbers of younger Jews have turned against Israel. International anti-Zionist Jewish networks have been proclaiming that Palestinians have every right to resist, declaring that Israel does not speak in their name. This is an important rebuttal of Zionist propaganda, claiming that Israel represents all Jews across the world.

Righteous people mourn the loss of life of all the civilians that have died, Jews and Palestinians. This is a basic point of moral decency. Yet decency also requires the recognition that the losses on both sides are incomparable and vastly disproportionate where 95% of dead and wounded, and thousands of children, are Palestinians.

Palestinians had no hand in the Nazi Holocaust but have been made to pay the price for a crime of European fascism. They have lost their land and rights as victims of a colonial project and are the ones suffering unspeakable brutality. Throughout history slave uprisings have targeted slave owners and their families as well as the system of slavery. These uprisings were just. We must regret all loss of civilian life, especially war crimes, but that regret cannot be misused to deny the justice of the Palestinian cause and the moral and legal right of Palestinians to armed resistance.

Whither Gaza – Whither Palestine – Whither Israel?

The gravity of the situation for Gaza, and all Palestinians, looks bleaker than ever. Or could there be a twist in the tale?

As horrendous as the situation is, Israel’s plans might not be as unchallenged as expected. It is never wise to deploy military force on the scale involved in an emotive knee-jerk reaction, with no clear military and political objectives.

Apart from the lack of a clear strategy, at the tactical level, the prospect of the ground invasion having to contend with the intricate tunnel system the resistance fighters have developed over the years would be daunting for any military.

Attacking in urban conditions, with rubble and collapsed buildings creating problems for tanks, against a formidable opponent, is the most difficult and dangerous of all military operations. Hamas has demonstrated extraordinary mastery of guerrilla tactics as illustrated by the lessons it dished out to the Israeli army on October 7, and in previous Israeli assaults on the territory.

The Israeli army cannot afford to face any further calamities. The Israeli public will not readily forgive the political elite and a military whose inadequacies have already been so rudely exposed – in part owing to racial hubris and complacency; in part because it has become a glorified police force dealing with stone throwing teenagers.

An occupation force of a corrupt and decrepit state, despite all its boasting, cannot produce sustained high morale, especially when up against a highly motivated opponent, contemptuous of death, with a deeply felt cause. Hamas knew that a ground force invasion would inevitably follow an operation such as Al-Aqsa Flood and would have carefully prepared much more than the anticipated booby-trapped tunnels. Who knows what surprises there are in store for the invaders?

Moreover, Israel has to maintain considerable force on its northern front with Lebanon, and its feared opponent, Hezbollah. Skirmishes have already been occurring there as guerrilla fighters probe Israel’s defences. Likewise, the West Bank resistance is likely to register a potent response, along with possible flare-ups within Israel itself.

Guerrilla fighters throughout the region have developed impressive operational capacity and daring and demonstrate a far greater threat to Israeli military prowess than the conventional Arab armies that Israel contended with in 1948 and 1967. The Israeli army’s deployment is already greatly stretched as will be Israel’s economy and military call up of its reserve force over a protracted period.

The Israeli families of those Hamas captured, are becoming extremely impatient with the Government’s reluctance to negotiate a prisoner exchange. The release of some captives with Western citizenship, through outside intervention, is placing enormous pressure on Netanyahu and his ilk. As possible prisoner exchanges like those take place, the obduracy of the Israeli state will become more objectionable. Recall that in 2011 the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit was exchanged for over 1,000 Palestinian prisoners. Hamas is holding a very strong card. And its support will grow.

Furthermore, the US-Israeli objective of propping-up the Palestine Authority (PA), of dividing Palestinians between the West Bank and Gaza, between Fatah and Hamas, has long rendered Mahmoud Abbas a lame duck with no credibility, the two-state solution as futile, and the notion of only peaceful forms of struggle as inadequate.

Current events have put paid to those plans or the idea that the PA could be brought in to govern the Gaza Strip. Gaza is uniting the determination and belief of Palestinians everywhere – in the occupied territories, within Israel itself, in the refugee camps of the region, in the prisons and in the Diaspora.

That’s not the only headache for Western objectives. Both the USA and Israel are concerned at the possible setback to the Abrahamic Accord and Israel’s normalization with its neighbors, which Netanyahu was only recently boasting about in his UN General Assembly address in September.

As spineless and even treacherous as most Arab governments have been regarding support for the Palestinians over the years – Algeria, Syria and Yemen Houthi’s, along with Hezbollah, are among exceptions – the unprecedented Palestinian resistance has galvanized the Arab masses as reflected in the huge protests in the Middle East and beyond and is bound to create a dilemma for those regimes.

The last thing the USA wants is a quagmire in the Middle East, with mass uprisings against client US regimes from Egypt and Jordan to Saudi Arabia. The US simply cannot afford this at a time when their proxy war in the Ukraine is unravelling, the Kiev counter-offensive grinding to a halt, and Russia gaining the upper hand. The US has recklessly generated tensions with China.

At the same time, the alliance between China and Russia is strengthening. They are being less stand-off in their dealings with Israel and would most likely support Iran if needs be, leading to a regional test of strength with the West.

Given such factors, Israel could find that there are limits to the backing it will receive from the US and Western Europe in a volatile situation. Moreover, while buildings might be reduced to rubble, and thousands killed, Palestinians have exhibited the most extraordinary resilience and steadfastness (sumud) over decades.

Ben Gurion once said that after the 1948 Palestinian generation, ‘the old will die, and the young will forget’. These hopes were in vain. Palestinians have not forgotten, and they have not accepted permanent oppression as their fate.

Hamas and the other resistance groups in Gaza and the West Bank are part of the people, not alien entities. This is a key tenet in successful guerrilla struggles. Much depends on how Hamas contains the ground invasion and forces the Israeli army into something of an impasse. Much also depends on international reaction.

It is vital we do everything possible to forestall the slaughter, and through the power of international solidarity enable and strengthen UN’s role, and apply pressure on the US and Western Europe, to support an immediate ceasefire.

Most important of all is People’s Power – direct action in the streets worldwide as never seen before; along with the intensification of the BDS campaign to completely isolate Zionist Israel.

The indiscriminate bombing of civilians deepens resolve and invokes resistance. The Palestinian spirit is unbreakable. Like the mythical phoenix, defiant and heroic Gaza will rise from the fire.

_{Ronnie Kasrils, veteran of the anti-apartheid struggle, and South Africa’s former Minister for Intelligence Services, activist and author. He contributed this piece to The Palestine Chronicle}