This week, Gaza’s Ministry of Health reports at least 37,925 people have been killed and 87,141 wounded in Israeli attacks on Gaza since October 7. One of Gaza’s few remaining hospitals, European Gaza Hospital, has been forced to evacuate patients, even those in critical condition. Israeli bombs continue to rain death, destruction, and terror up and down Gaza. 

The resulting injuries, desperate conditions, and disease threaten almost the entire population. On July 5, Israeli airstrikes killed at least six people in central Gaza, including two children at home and at least one United Nations aid worker wearing a UN vest. Those were innocent civilians, the overwhelming target of U.S.-supplied Israeli bombs and missiles.

On July 5, I was scrolling down the online home page of the New York Times with images of this death and suffering filling my head and heart. I scrolled down. And down. AND DOWN. I scrolled past dozens of articles on events major and trivial. And finally, out of hundreds of articles, one small link appeared to a single article on what is going on—or rather covering up what is going on—in Gaza. It is an article asserting once again that there is progress on ceasefire talks. These promises have cruelly aroused hopes in Gaza, but to date Israel has been the main obstacle to negotiating a ceasefire even as the U.S. continually insists it is Hamas that is holding up a ceasefire.

Who Are the Real Terrorists?

The rest of the ruling class media was as bad or worse. The “liberal” Washington Post featured a story titled “Gaza war a recruiting boon for terrorists, U.S. intelligence shows.” To be clear, terrorism—targeting civilians with violence to accomplish political ends—is wrong. Terrorism is an expression of what revolutionary leader, author of the new communism Bob Avakian (BA) has called the “poisonous notion that the ends justify the means.” But if you want to talk about the most extreme and gross expression of terrorism, it is exactly what Israel is doing with U.S. backing in Gaza. After October 7, Israel’s President declared that “It is an entire nation out there that is responsible.” And that “civilians” in Gaza were responsible for October 7 because they “could have risen up” against Hamas, implying, and sending a message up and down Israeli society including to the military, that civilians are legitimate targets. And civilians have been the main targets and victims of Israel’s U.S.-backed onslaught in Gaza.

But the Washington Post piece makes no mention of that terrorism. It covers up who the biggest terrorists are by far. And it trains readers to blame the spread of anti-U.S. anger on Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7, without any context, without mention of Israel’s 75 years of genocidal ethnic cleansing. 

The article fixates readers emotions on fear of an outbreak of anti-U.S. terrorism, while barely noting in passing that “U.S. weapons transfers to Israel in the conflict [are] a key source of anger in the Muslim world.” Fact check: What is going on in Gaza is not a “conflict,” as the Washington Post puts it, or a “war.” It is a one-sided genocidal massacre. By mid-April 2024, an estimated 14,500 children in Gaza had been killed. And Save the Children, an international child protection agency, issued a report at the end of June estimating that as many as an additional 21,000 children in Gaza are “trapped beneath rubble, detained, buried in unmarked graves, or lost from their families.” 

And those U.S. “weapons transfers,” along with never-ending coverups for Israel’s crimes by the U.S., have enabled Israel to turn Gaza into a massive killing field for civilians. 

These two articles I just pointed to are more or less random—in one day—examples of the shameful and overwhelming mix of whitewash, covering up U.S.-backed Israeli genocide, and programming Americans to close their eyes. They evoke nothing more than the way that in German society under Hitler, the “good Germans,” were shielded from and conditioned to tune out and even justify the stench from burning bodies emanating from the gas chambers where the NAZIs were systematically, genocidally, exterminating the Jews of Europe. 

Behind the Whitewash—the Destruction of Gaza and Its People

Since 2008, the Palestinian people in Gaza have been literally locked down in a massive outdoor prison, subjected to food rations calculated to be barely enough to live on. And subjected to periodic massacres that killed thousands in 2008-2009 and 2014 alone. That was a living hell. It was not anything anyone should want to go back to. But as a baseline, it serves to highlight just how beyond-the-pale of crimes against humanity Israel has gone in Gaza since October 7. (In the following, I am in part bouncing off a powerful Instagram post from the Institute for Middle East Understanding.)

Before October 7, 2023, there was water. Food was hard to come by, but there were farms, a fishing industry, and bakeries, along with food aid carefully calculated by Israel to keep people on the verge of starvation. Hundreds of thousands of students were enrolled in schools, many run by the UN. These schools managed to produce advanced students in many fields. Healthcare professionals managed to provide some care under sadistic Israeli restrictions on necessary imports. 

People suffered under a brutal Israeli chokehold. And within that, under Hamas, which administered Gaza. People struggled with each other over how to oppose Israel. Protests in different forms erupted against Israel, including on Land Day (the Great March of Return) in 2018 when Israel massacred at least 15 unarmed protesters and injured 1,400 more, systematically shooting them in the leg to cripple them. There were forms of protest against Hamas’s imposition of Islamic law (including a movement in 2022 by high school girls to refuse to wear stifling hijabs to school). Poets wrote poems, sharing the brutal oppression of the Palestinian people with the world. Musicians created music—sometimes defying and denouncing reactionary Islamic authorities as well as Israel.

All that is in ruins, bombed into rubble. Israel has destroyed or badly damaged the vast majority of schools in Gaza, leaving over 625,000 students without any access to education. These schools were destroyed by U.S.-supplied bombs. And 7,000 students are not in school because they have been killed by U.S.-supplied bombs (see All the children in Gaza are out of school, Hi-Us). 

Israel has systematically destroyed the main sources of drinkable water in Gaza, along with farms and bakeries. These are defined, internationally recognized war crimes.

Israel’s calculated destruction of sewage systems and waste disposal facilities combined with famine, lack of shelter or medical treatment has created widespread epidemics of dangerous diseases. And Israel subjects the survivors to 24-7 terror and death from bombs, missiles, snipers, tanks, and the ever-present threat and psychological torture of the hum of drones overhead, identifying and targeting victims at random. 

Israel has destroyed or crippled every medical facility in Gaza. I can’t detail that here, but watch my interview with a doctor from the European Hospital in southeast Gaza before Israel forced staff and patients, in desperate conditions, to evacuate.

Israel’s U.S.-backed genocidal devastation in Gaza is a crime against humanity of historic proportions, and it is an ongoing and escalating crime.

This Is Not Fundamentally a "War" on Hamas, This Is Genocide

Since I ranted against the way the mainstream ruling class media is programming people in this country to think and feel, a very brief review of reality is needed. 

History did not begin on October 7, 2023, when Hamas raided Israel, a raid that included war crimes of taking civilian hostages and murder of civilians. Palestinian people in Gaza have been brutally oppressed along with the rest of the Palestinian people since the Nakba (Arabic for catastrophe), the genocidal ethnic cleansing by Israel that erupted with rape, terror, and murder in 1948. The Nakba drove some 750,000 Palestinians from their homeland. The genocidal ethnic cleansing of Palestine has continued ever since, periodically exploding in spasms of mass death and destruction. You can learn more, much more, and share it from social media posts by revolutionary leader Bob Avakian, especially #4, #5, #6, and #7. And, at the Gaza Resource section of revcom.us. 

That is the context for what happened after October 7. Israel seized on the Hamas attack to crush Hamas, an organization it enabled for years, but which had evolved from a useful tool to a threat. But much more fundamentally, Israel seized on the October 7 attack to attempt a “final solution” (a term Hitler used to refer to the elimination of the Jewish people in Europe); that is, making it impossible for the Palestinian people to survive as a people in the historic homeland of Palestine—whether through mass murder, exile, imprisonment, even more brutal oppression… or all of the above.

What Needs to Be Done NOW! 

The sustained depravity of Israel’s genocide, and the stubborn support for that in the form of billions of dollars of weapons from the U.S. has aroused outrage around the world. It has posed real problems for Biden’s approach of moving the “Palestinian problem” (as the U.S. rulers see it) off the table to make it possible to more openly align reactionary Arab regimes like Saudi Arabia with the U.S. and Israel against Iran. It has seriously threatened Biden’s chances of re-election. And it threatens to explode into a wider war with Iran-aligned forces in Lebanon.

And yet, the commitment to Israel by both sides of the viciously clashing sections of the U.S. ruling class, Genocide Joe and the Democrats and the MAGA Republican fascists, is too deep, too sustained, too determined to be seriously explained as a flaw in the system, including with illusions that this is all about special interest lobbies setting foreign policy for an empire of global exploitation and oppression. 

Up to now, there have been important and heroic protests on campuses and beyond in the face of ferocious violent repression. Disgust for Genocide Joe Biden among large sections of Democratic Party voters was reflected in the 100,000 protest votes cast against Biden in the Michigan presidential primary election, and by one in five Democratic voters in the Minnesota Democratic primary. There have been public resignations in protest by a dozen State Department officials. All this reveals a sense of the yet-to-be fully unleashed potential for the much broader, and more determined protest throughout society that is needed now.

And there needs to be a serious debate about what it will take to end horrors like this once and for all, with people digging seriously into BA's scientific understanding about the system that is driving this and the revolution that is necessary and possible to put an end to this system. 

BA cuts through to the real problem and solution in his social media dispatch Revolution #7.

Why is Biden, and basically the entire government and ruling class of the U.S., supporting Israel in carrying out genocide against the Palestinian people, before the whole world? Here is the answer to that crucial question:

This is not because of “the power of the Jewish lobby”—or because of some ignorant, ridiculous and outrageous notion that “Jews are controlling everything.” It is because Israel plays a “special role” as a heavily armed bastion of support for U.S. imperialism in a strategically important part of the world (the “Middle East”). And Israel has been a key force in the commission of atrocities which have helped to maintain the oppressive rule of U.S. imperialism in many other parts of the world. …

It’s the system! The system of capitalism-imperialism that Biden serves. The system he has to serve—the system that anybody and everybody has to serve if they want to hold office, and especially “high office,” like president, within this system. That is why Biden is doing what he’s doing—what all these politicians are doing—above and beyond their more narrow personal interests.

It’s the system! This system of capitalism-imperialism that embodies and enforces white supremacy, patriarchal male supremacy and other brutal oppression— this system resting on ruthless life-stealing exploitation of masses of people in this country and literally billions of people worldwide, including more than 150 million children—all enforced with massive violence and destruction, of people and the environment, posing a very real threat to the future and the existence of humanity.

This system that needs to be overthrown at the soonest possible time, through an actual revolution.