Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, the armed uprising of Palestinians in Gaza against Israeli rule, has taken Israel by surprise. The break-out from Gaza, the world’s biggest prison camp, accompanied by a fusillade of thousands of missiles from the Izz al-Din al-Qassem Brigades, the Hamas military wing, and the seizure back of important colonised land including Sderot and Askelon, which used to be Arab-inhabited territory until the indigenous people were put to flight by Zionist terrorists in 1948.
This bold Palestinian military uprising is yet another expression of the decline of the imperialist world system in the crisis of the Zionist regime, an ingredient that integrates and deepens the decadence of the system, as well as the crisis of French rule in Africa, challenged and defeated by the military uprisings in Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger, following the defeat that imperialism has suffered in Ukraine.
This is a breathtaking event – the oppressed turning the tables on the oppressor after many decades of slow genocide. It is excellent from the point of view of genuine communists, as tribunes of the oppressed, that the boot is on the other foot and Israel’s armed colonists are now running scared of the people they oppressed, and whose homeland and homes they stole, for decades. Such is the genocidal brutality of the Israeli indiscriminate terror against the Palestinian civilian population in Gaza, that the actions of Hamas militants in taking both military and civilian prisoners to Gaza, actually has a humanitarian element to it. Given the ‘master race’ psychology of Israel, the belief that Palestinian life is worthless whereas Jewish life is infinitely precious, this would seem a valid incentive for Israel not to simply carpet bomb Gaza as they have done repeatedly since Hamas came to power in 2005, most notoriously in the massacres of Operation Cast Lead (2009) and Operation Protective Edge (2014).
These settlers live on land and even homes directly taken from previous Palestinian inhabitants, and driven into exile by murderous Zionists using methods purloined wholesale from Nazi Germany. Israel has for decades wanted to treat the inhabitants of the Gaza Strip in a similar way that Adolf Hitler treated the inhabitants of the Warsaw Ghetto in WWII. But however murderous their intentions, Israel does not have the power to simply exterminate Palestinians in that manner.
Attempts to do so provoke intense rage and solidarity from not just Palestinians, but from the Arab masses and other sympathetic populations in the region. It would risk Israel’s tame allies in the regions crumbling before the masses. Hezbollah in Lebanon has stated, in response to the Netanyahu/Ben Gvir far right coalition statement that Israel is now ‘at war’ (when was it ever not so?) that an attack by Israeli ground troops on Gaza will mean that Hezbollah will enter the war, perhaps with a similar military operation to the one waged by the Izz al-Din al-Qassem Brigades in the South.
Both Hamas and Hezbollah now appear to have access to newer missile technology, and drones, much of it the result of Iranian innovations in the field, which appears to have somewhat shifted the military balance of forces in the region. Such is the efficiency of some of this Iranian military technology that Russian forces have made use of Iranian drones in the Ukraine war. Hezbollah has plenty of this materiel, and Hamas appears to have at least home-manufactured supplies of similar design, even though undoubtedly not fabricated in Iran. This played an important role in the Saif Al Quds war of 2021, when Hamas fought the Israelis to a standstill in a retaliatory offensive for Israeli attacks on the Al Aqsa Mosque in East Jerusalem, Islam’s third most-holy shrine, which Jewish-Zionist extremists want to destroy and replace with their ‘Third Temple’.
The 2021 conflict was the most significant victory of Arab forces ever over Israel, and has laid the basis for this conflict, that has Israel once again in something of a mess, militarily, having somewhat overreached itself under this far right coalition of Netanhayu with Kahanists and other Jewish settler extremists, whose best-known figure is the Jewish Power leader and National Security minister, Ben Gvir. The accelerated persecution of Palestinians in the West Bank, attempting to drive Palestinian populations there into a similar state of constant military attack as endured by Gaza Palestinians, has tended to drive Palestinians closer together and to broaden sympathy for Hamas. When moderately free elections were last held in 2005 in the West Bank and Gaza as an occupied entity, Hamas convincingly won the elections as they were seen by the masses and incorruptible and not able to be coopted by Israel, unlike the puppet Palestinian authority under Abbas and Fatah.
This act of fighting back has predictably led to outrage from the imperialist politicians of the West, who scream about the supposed ‘terrorism’ of an oppressed people fighting against ethnic cleansing and persecution. The swine were recently exposed in Canada for what they really are when in unison with their far right Ukrainian stooge Zelensky, a Zionist who vows to make Ukraine a ‘big Israel’ (through a similar ethnic cleansing of the Russian-speaking people of the Donbass), the Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, a thoroughly mainstream (neo)-liberal figure who something of an archetype of Western hypocrisy, was seen publicly saluting a 98-year old veteran of Hitler’s SS. The West’s support for Zionist Israel, as well as their support for Nazi Ukraine, are really signs of the rehabilitation of fascist barbarism that is taking place in Western bourgeois politics as their system slides toward a final crisis.
Israel appears to have major problems in this conflict, that once again it has provoked by its ceaseless persecution of the Palestinian people, aimed at a slow genocide, to make Palestinians lives unliveable, so they will either leave or die out. It’s good that Israel has major problems. Its cohesion needs to be destroyed, its ability to wage war against the Arab masses needs to be crippled, to give the Palestinian people the military and political space to wage a struggle for full equality and the full right to return for all the Palestinian people. That must point toward the creation of a multi-ethnic workers state of Palestine through the means of permanent revolution, a rearmed workers movement leading the national struggle to victory. That requires solidarity, and the unequivocal taking of sides with the oppressed in this conflict and those to come. In this conflict we therefore say: One side right, one side wrong! Victory to the Palestinians!
