Think about major atrocities in world history—the U.S. genocide of America’s Native peoples, the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, incinerating 140,000 Japanese people, the My Lai massacre in Vietnam… 

A crime of enormous magnitude is looming over the Palestinian people right now. It could not, and would not, be happening without the direct support and complicity of your government. It must be stopped and never be allowed to happen again - anywhere!

Israeli Prime Minister Netan-Nazi (Benjamin Netanyahu) has ordered the Israeli military to prepare to attack Rafah and to draw up plans to “evacuate the civilian population.” As we go to press, Israel’s military announced that it had carried out a “wave of attacks” on Rafah, including bombings with an unknown number of civilians killed.¹ Rafah is as far south as you can go in Gaza—right up against its border with Egypt. Once a city of 270,000, it is now the last refuge for over 1.4 million Palestinians who’ve fled Israel’s massive, systematic destruction of northern and central Gaza. Over 28,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza with over half the buildings in Gaza bombed or bulldozed into rubble or sand.² 

Try and imagine being parents with young children living in Rafah right now. Your home was destroyed and you’ve been living on the streets for months. You huddle against the cold and rain under a plastic covering that you found in the trash. Some days, you manage to get a piece of bread and a bottle of water to share among the family, other days nothing. Your kids are constantly hungry and afraid. Now, one has an infection, but the hospitals are overflowing or under attack. You live in constant terror that an Israeli bomb will explode somewhere near, killing or maiming you or your young ones. 

There are over a million like you, and now you’re being told Israeli troops are going to attack. You know what they did in Gaza City and Khan Younis—killing and wounding thousands and leveling whole neighborhoods. You’re being told to evacuate, but where will you go? 

Netan-Nazi promises that civilians will be evacuated to a “safe zone.” But nowhere in Gaza is safe. This alleged “safe zone” is reported to be Al Mawasi on Gaza’s southern coast. But that's a small area several miles away. How will you and your kids get there? On foot through a war zone as bombs drop and shells explode? 

And then what? Al Mawasi is a so-called “safe zone” that is the size of an airport. How can 1.4 million people fit? That's like cramming everyone in Manhattan into LaGuardia or JFK. How the hell will that work? There isn’t a facility in Al Mawasi—there's nothing there, no food, no water, no shelters, no hospitals, no services. There's “only sand and more sand, to absorb the blood, the sewage, and the epidemics,” Israeli author and journalist Gideon Levy, wrote in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.³ 

It's very possible that Israel’s real aim in cramming people so tightly together, without food and water, is to force them across the border into Egypt. For months, powerful forces in Israel’s government have been openly declaring they aim to push Palestinians completely out of Gaza and fill it with Israelis. Egypt is taking such a possibility seriously. It’s deployed dozens of tanks along its border with Gaza signaling to Israel and the Palestinians that they can’t cross. 

Whatever the exact shape of Israel’s next moves, an attack on Rafah would be a major leap—adding horror on top of horror. 

As we've written previously on revcom.us: What is happening—what has been happening overall—with the Israeli attack on Palestine is Netan-nazi seizing on October 7 to attempt a “final solution” to the “Palestinian problem.” Israel aims, at a minimum, to reduce the Palestinians to such a state that they will no longer pose any problem for Israel, if not literally killing off and/or driving out all the Palestinians. 

For over three months, Israel has been massacring Palestinians on a mass scale, making Gaza uninhabitable, driving Palestinians from their homes, and now possibly forcing them into Egypt. This would be a leap toward destroying the Palestinians as a people and one of history’s great crimes against humanity. 

Again, we must do all we can, now, to prevent this screaming atrocity.

Genocide Joe Biden Most Delicately Criticizes Israel… Signifying Nothing! 

In the last week, Biden has oh-so-lightly stepped up his public criticism of Israel, calling its response to being attacked by Hamas on October 7 “over the top,” saying the deaths of innocent Palestinians in Gaza has “got to stop,” and pushing for a “sustained pause in the fighting.” Other U.S. officials warned the U.S. will not support an Israeli assault on Rafah.⁴ 

But this is worse than bullshit. Biden has continued to give his full support to Israel: blocking any ceasefire resolutions at the UN, deploying U.S. naval fleets to attack anti-Israel forces in the region, and shipping billions in weapons to Israel including five thousand 2,000-pound civilian-killing bombs. In fact, Biden is trying to get $14.1 billion more in military aid for Israel passed through Congress right now.⁵

This would be like Biden saying, “you know, Hitler: killing all those Jews is really over the top... but can I send you more gas for those gas chambers?”

Biden's Participation in the Forced Starvation of Gaza

Biden claims he’s “pushing really hard, really hard, to get humanitarian assistance into Gaza.” Again, this is worse than bullshit.

On January 26, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) said that it's plausible that Israel is committing genocide and ordered Israel to prevent death, destruction and any acts of genocide in Gaza, and to allow access of humanitarian aid.⁶  In the face of mountains of evidence, the U.S. publicly dismissed these findings as “meritless, counterproductive and completely without any basis and fact whatsoever.”⁷ 

The very same day as the ICJ ruling, Israel made a big public statement claiming that Gaza's main relief agency, UNRWA, had 12 employees (out of 13,000 employees total) who took part in Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel. UNWRA is the United Nations Works and Relief Agency and it's the main agency millions of Palestinians count on for food, shelter, schooling, and survival.

This led to a big outcry from the U.S. which announced it was cutting off aid to UNRWA. Sixteen other countries followed suit. This deprived UNRWA of $65 million and may force it to end aid operations in Gaza by the end of this month—at the very time when people in Gaza are facing a famine, with a quarter million people already starving!⁸ 

But it turns out that there was no evidence for Israel's claim. Channel 4 in the UK reviewed a copy of the dossier Israel circulated against UNRWA and found it contained “no evidence to support its explosive new claim.”⁹

So again, in the face of mountains of evidence: the U.S. dismisses the fact that Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza. And in the face of no evidence: the U.S. cuts off funding to one of the only ways the people of Gaza are getting food, thereby contributing to this genocide.

These are monstrous crimes coming from a monstrous system.

Why is Biden, and basically the entire government and ruling class of the U.S., supporting Israel?

The U.S. and the Netan-nazi government in Israel do have differences over how to go forward in this volatile, very explosive situation. But those differences are about how to best maintain the strength and stability of Israel—including the violent oppression and subordination of the Palestinian people. And because of the essential role that Israel plays for U.S. imperialism, the U.S. is stuck with and sticking by Israel.

The revolutionary leader and author of the new communism, Bob Avakian, speaks to why Biden is backing Israel and why he has to back Israel in his REVOLUTION Number Seven social media dispatch: 

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.

(That is from my statement Some Basic Truths About the U.S. Supported Israeli War Against Palestine, which is posted at revcom.us.)

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.