A mass internationalist movement must be raised!
The Zionist genocide perpetrated in Gaza continues to focus the world's political attention. A massacre that has claimed the lives of more than 70,000 people[1] and tens of thousands more from cold, hunger or lack of medicine, mostly children and women, left hundreds of thousands injured and forcibly displaced 1.9 million Palestinians. Violence has turned homes into ruins and crushed the most basic needs of the population with more than 100,000 tons of bombs dropped by the Israeli army, four times more than the Nazi bombing of London during the Second World War.
The Greater Israel project moves forward with the support of Western imperialism.
As if this devastation were not enough, Netanyahu and his extreme right-wing henchmen, with the enthusiastic backing of Donald Trump's administration, want to take the plan of ethnic cleansing and expulsion of the Gazans from their territories to its ultimate consequences. The permanent military occupation of Gaza, the demolition of hundreds of Palestinian homes in the West Bank and the massacres that the army and armed settler gangs are carrying out, the famine imposed through the total blockade of supplies, all this holocaust, is taking place openly without any capitalist power lifting a finger.
On 5 May, the murderous government of Israel, through Benjamin Netanyahu, advanced its determination to complete the strategy of extermination with words that evoke the Nazi regime: ‘It is time to take the final steps’. He thus announced his particular ‘final solution’ to definitively conquer Gaza, formalise his occupation, establish a military government, ‘relocate’ and move the population to concentration camps, implementing Trump's plan to expel two million Palestinians from their land. Tens of thousands of IDF reservists have been called up for this purpose.
They feel so unpunished that they don't even hide anymore. This is the first time Netanyahu has publicly stated that his priority is to annex Gaza. Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has stated that Gaza will be totally destroyed and the population massively displaced to third countries. National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir has publicly advocated cutting off all electricity supplies and bombing those who seek to supply food and life-sustaining goods.
The Palestinian holocaust continues to be carried out, ever more atrociously and overwhelmingly. Cheered on by the international far right, with its führer Donald Trump at the helm, Netanyahu moves forward without compassion. The worst massacre of the 21st century is taking place with the consent of the governments of the ‘democratic’ powers and the complicit silence of Western social democracy.
Trump's plan: ethnic cleansing to control the Middle East
The destruction of Gaza has been accompanied by numerous provocations by Netanyahu to impose his desired project of a theocratic and totalitarian Greater Israel: the invasion of southern Lebanon and military strikes against Iran. They know that they are an indispensable force in Washington's plans in its struggle to maintain world supremacy over China and Russia. And the blow they have unloaded in Syria demonstrates Israeli and American determination to keep control of this key area of the world.
Trump's return to the White House has been a further step in US imperialism's strategy of unconditionally supporting Israel as its main ally in the struggle to regain and strengthen its power in the Middle East. The repeated bombings by US aircraft against the Houthi militias in Yemen and Trump's constant threats to crush the Palestinian resistance militarily, just as Netanyahu continues to massacre the population and destroy what is left standing in Gaza, make it abundantly clear that the cruelty of the Zionist regime has a fanatical supporter in the US president.
Trump is taking the military, financial and diplomatic support given by Biden and the Democrats to the Zionists to its ultimate consequences. In a context in which the economic policies he has deployed, starting with tariffs, are not achieving satisfactory results in his goal of confronting and curbing the development of China as the world's hegemonic power, the White House, also hit hard by its resounding failure in the war in Ukraine, has decided that it was time for Netanyahu to break the truce and try to implement the ‘final solution’ for the Palestinian people now.
Netanyahu has grabbed the plan presented by Trump last February, when he openly advocated completing ethnic cleansing, deporting Palestinians and turning Gaza into a luxury resort. After Israel unilaterally broke the ceasefire, tailor-made for Zionism and US imperialism, Netanyahu banned the already insufficient entry of any humanitarian aid.
Nearly two months of a blood-and-fire blockade, with episodes such as the infamous drone bombing of the Freedom Flotilla, has brought Gaza, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross, ‘to the brink of total collapse’. 91% of the population is ‘food insecure’, meaning that famine is claiming the lives of thousands of people. The faces of malnourished Palestinian children show the inhumanity of the Zionist entity.
Netanyahu is now preparing to fully occupy the Gaza Strip of which he has already de facto annexed 30%. According to the UN, the Palestinian population is currently only able to move through one third of the territory. The refugee camps are constantly bombed by Zionist aircraft, while Netanyahu and his henchmen deepen their colonialist aggression against the West Bank.
In the south, on 5 May, the Israeli government demolished most of the village of Khallet al-Daba in the Masafer Yatta area. This is the largest demolition ever carried out in the region. Months earlier, settlers had violently attacked the village and set fire to several houses. Zionist settlements and the expulsion of thousands of Palestinians are multiplying. Inside, Netanyahu imposes a Nazi terror regime against dissent, relying on an increasingly fascistised state apparatus and thousands of his increasingly armed ultra-right-wing supporters.
This massacre against the Palestinian people and the impunity enjoyed by Zionism also points the finger at the capitalist governments of the Arab world, those corrupt regimes subservient to Washington and Brussels that starve their peoples and scorn the massive mobilisations against genocide that have taken place in their countries. And, although a section of the left may not like it, the Palestinian genocide directly challenges Putin and Xi Jinping, who are always ready to make declarations and present resolutions in favour of the Palestinian people, but who in fact maintain full trade and diplomatic relations with Israel.
China is Israel's second largest trading partner, and like Russia has not only not lifted a finger to prevent this massacre, but has strengthened its economic ties with Israel and the other capitalist countries of the Middle East. No boycott of Israeli products, no severing of diplomatic relations, no call for the Arab populations to rise up against their governments and to promote the revolutionary struggle against Zionism. None of this. Moscow and Beijing are opting for realpolitik, thus paving the way for Zionism and its plans. How important are the Palestinian people to the interests of the big Russian and Chinese monopolies and the imperialist Great Game to dominate the Middle East?
The complicit hypocrisy of the PSOE-Sumar government
All this slaughter is being carried out with the criminal complicity of the European Union and the different Western governments. And not only those of the right and extreme right, yesterday anti-Semitic and today defenders of Zionism, but also those led by social democracy, as we see in the Spanish state.
Pedro Sánchez is a master of empty and cynical gestures, such as recognising the Palestinian state and tweeting against the Zionist slaughter. The far right is crying over this. But the fundamental point is that the PSOE and Sumar government maintains all economic, military and diplomatic relations with Israel, and has legitimised police and judicial repression against university camps and police infiltration of pro-Palestinian associations.
A recent report by the Centre Delàs d'Estudis per la Pau[2] has revealed that since the beginning of the Zionist genocide, in October 2023, the Spanish government has awarded 46 contracts to Israeli military industries for more than a billion euros (ten of them pending formalisation). This shows that the PSOE-Sumar government is lying when it denies that the arms trade with Israel continuous. In addition, Spanish ports, led by the Rota naval base, have been used to send munitions and other military supplies to Israel, despite claims that this was not being done. Pedro Sánchez's recent announcement to the gallery to rescind one of these ten outstanding contracts does not change the complicit of his policy, which Sumar is fully accepting.
To all this must be added the increase of more than 10 billion euros in the military budget, exceeding 40 billion and reaching 2.5 percent of GDP. This wave of warmongering that is sweeping the EU, encouraged and led by social democracy, is a firm commitment of the Western ruling class in a context of inter-imperialist struggle and foreseeable popular mobilisations in the face of the constant impoverishment and degradation of living conditions. And the Zionist state is a key player in these plans, which is why they maintain such intense political, economic and military ties with Tel Aviv.
Experience shows that warmongering rearmament has nothing to do with defending democracy, but with fighting the enemy within, the working class and the youth. Israel is an example to the European ruling class of how things should be done at a given moment. This is not an exaggeration. They are preparing thoroughly for a fierce class struggle. The survival of capitalism is this: totalitarianism, genocide, war and imperialist barbarism.
Raising an international mass movement to stop the genocide
In these almost two years of Zionist genocide it has become clear who are the allies of the Palestinian people: the oppressed, the youth and the working class who have flooded the streets all over the world by millions.
The mass demonstrations and numerous protest actions have spread from the Arab countries to the USA, Europe and other continents showing the strength and willingness that exists to raise a great international movement of solidarity with the Palestinian people and stop this holocaust that is being carried out by Nentanyahu and Trump.
In Spain, the student movement, the most militant sectors of the labour movement and hundreds of thousands of workers have also shown our willingness to fight. But the leaders of the CCOO and UGT, like their European counterparts, are so comfortable in their offices and live so well on their opulent salaries paid by the state, that they have not only refused to call a general strike for Palestine, demanding that the government completely break off economic and diplomatic relations with Israel, but they have shown themselves to be firm supporters of militarist budgets and submission to NATO.
The task of the militant activists, trade unionists and militants, of the workers and youth who are not resigned to accept a future of war, reaction and misery to which they want to lead us, is clear. We have to promote organisation, mobilisation and mass actions to break this social peace that has been imposed on us.
We call for active participation in the demonstrations that will be organised in the coming weeks and immediately this Saturday 10 May in Madrid, from Atocha to Sol, to demand an end to the Zionist genocide, the immediate breaking of relations with Israel and the arms embargo.
Stop the Zionist genocide. Palestine will win. For the Socialist Federation of the Middle East!
Not one euro, not one bullet for the imperialist war and Netanyahu's Nazi regime!
No to militarist budgets! Immediate exit from NATO!
If you want peace, fight for socialism!
