Today (Monday, October 7) is the one-year anniversary of the Hamas attack on Israel that became the trigger and the pretext for Israel’s horrific attack on the Palestinian people in Gaza… and then also on Palestinians on the West Bank… and now also on the people of neighboring Lebanon.¹

It is ongoing and escalating! And IT MUST BE STOPPED.

Shortly after this slaughter began, revolutionary leader Bob Avakian laid out fundamental truths about what was happening and why:

Israel is a country that, with the backing of major imperialist powers, was founded as a racist, Jewish supremacist state, 75 years ago, on the basis of horrific ethnic cleansing—with mass killing, rape, and destruction of whole villages of the Palestinians, driving masses of Palestinians off of their lands and incorporating that land into the expanding territory into what became the state of Israel (which had never existed before World War 2). And now Israel, with the full backing of the U.S. imperialists, is openly carrying out genocide against the Palestinians.

“Some Basic Truths About the U.S. Supported Israeli War Against Palestine,” Bob Avakian, October 20, 2023

Since that time the horrors—and the evidence of total U.S.-Israeli complicity in genocide—have only mounted. 

By conservative estimates, in less than a year, over 16,000 Gazan children have been killed². To get an idea of how unprecedented this is, in the first two years of the war in Ukraine (which has about 40 million people), about 2,000 children were killed or wounded. So eight times as many children were killed in Gaza (in one year) as were killed and injured in Ukraine (in two years.) 

This does not happen “by accident.” And you cannot drop 2,000-pound bombs on high-rise apartment buildings with hundreds of families and then claim that you didn’t “intend” to kill hundreds of children. Yet this is SOP for the Israeli military, day in and day out. More children have been killed in Gaza than in any conflict in the last 20 years. And on average, Israel has bombed civilian infrastructure every three hours, 24/7, for a solid year!

And it gets worse:

A letter (excerpted in a separate article in this issue of Revolution) from 99 U.S.-based medical professionals who have risked their lives working in hospitals in Gaza, along with an extensive appendix, documents that the actual death toll in Gaza is already over 100,000 Palestinians. 

The letter paints a vivid picture of the systematic, conscious mass murder of civilians, including children who were clearly targeted for assassination. These doctors and other medical professionals describe children whose brains were intentionally blown out by Israel snipers. That is emblematic of what the U.S. media, and politicians, shamefully call a “war” against “Hamas.” Thus the letter captures the reality of “Israel’s right to defend itself” that Genocide Joe and Killer Kamala invoke over and over to justify arming, funding, enabling, and defending Israel’s genocide.

Before October 7, locked-down Gaza, constantly under siege and subject to periodic Israeli massacres, was the world’s largest outdoor prison.³ Now it is the world’s largest death camp. The millions and millions of “flee now” phone messages Israel delivers before destroying schools, apartment buildings, hospitals, and places of worship have consistently ordered people into “safe zones” where they are again targeted by tanks, missiles and 2,000-pound bombs. Thousands of very young children have been separated from their parents, left to fend for themselves in a death-scape where there are no social services left standing and every family is scrambling to stay alive.

Channeling the Nazis

While Israel and its defenders may raise objections to international institutions that charge them with genocide, and while they demand that those who speak that truth be censored, blacklisted, fired, doxed, and brutalized, Israel has, in fact, openly proclaimed its genocidal intent. 

From the start of the genocide in early October 2023, Israel’s Defense Minister set the terms: “We are fighting human animals and we act accordingly. There will be no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel. Everything will be closed.” One of his aides said that “we have to attack these water treatment plants in order to create a situation of thirst and hunger in Gaza, and I would say, forewarn of an unprecedented economical and humanitarian crisis.”

You think that perhaps these were just extreme statements made in the wake of the October 7 attack by Hamas? In January of this year—after the killing of tens of thousands of women and children—a legislator from Israel’s ruling party declared that Gaza should be “burned now” and that there were no “innocents there.” In August of this year, Israel’s Finance Minister complained: “We can’t, in the current global reality, manage a war. Nobody will let us cause two million civilians to die of hunger, even though it might be justified … but what can we do? We live today in a certain reality, we need international legitimacy for this war.”

As happened with the German people under Hitler, the Jewish population in Israel are fed a steady barrage of the most racist, literally dehumanizing portrayal of the Palestinian people, the descendants of the 700,000 people driven from their homeland by terror, murder, and rape in the Nakba of 1948. 

Soldiers programmed with that genocidal madness have a green light to kill anything that moves in Gaza. They even shot three unarmed Israeli hostages who had escaped, even as they were shirtless, waving a white flag, and crying for help in Hebrew! Israel said they were “misidentified,” but it is at least a strong possibility that rather than being mistaken for armed combatants, they were mistaken for Palestinian civilians, which made them a target. 

And on top of direct murder at the hands of the Israeli military, thousands of Palestinians are seized, at random, imprisoned, and subjected to the most depraved brutality, starvation, and rape. (See “Welcome to Hell, the Israeli Prison System as a Network of Torture Camps,” an interview with an Israeli human rights activist.)

Then, on top of the mass killings of tens of thousands of civilians and the torture-prisons, the Israelis, backed by the U.S., have engaged in a deliberate policy of imposing concentration camp conditions on Gaza as a whole. Palestinians are locked in a small territory, facing extreme violence daily, and malnutrition, thirst, starvation, disease and homelessness every minute of every day. 

Resistance, Repression, and the Deadly Trap of “the Lesser Evil”

Many different sections of people poured into streets across the U.S. (and around the world) in condemnation of Israel’s crimes. Students as well as teachers at elite universities, Palestinian youth and many sections of the Palestinian-American community, artists and other intellectuals all came into motion, with many suffering threats and repression. The role of American Jews in the early struggles—including dramatic acts of civil disobedience in New York—played a particular role, including in their insistence that far from being anti-Semitic, fighting against the genocidal attacks by the Israeli state gave expression to what the meaning of the slogan “Never again” should be—“never again” for any people. Pro-Palestine tent encampments started springing up on dozens of campuses, including elite universities like Columbia, Harvard, Yale, Stanford, UCLA and University of Chicago; in some places university buildings were taken over.

This was met with shocking levels of repression—encampments were repeatedly attacked and torn down by city cops who were called in by university administrators. Students were arrested and/or beaten, suspended or expelled in the thousands, reawakening the memory of such attacks on students in the 1960s… and some of that same defiance as well. 

Many campuses were put under “lockdown,” with checkpoints to block the entry of “outside agitators.” At some campuses, particularly UCLA, fascist/Zionist mobs were unleashed to physically attack encampments and students while cops stood idly by. 

This was coupled with, and supposedly “justified” by, the claim that any serious criticism of the state of Israel—and definitely any criticism that called out Israel’s role as an apartheid state built on ethnic cleansing and Jewish supremacy—amounted to anti-Semitism (i.e., hatred of Jewish people in general) and to support for the Hamas attack on Israel. This claim—that anti-Zionism equals anti-Semitism—was incessantly propagated by the U.S. State Department and other U.S. political leaders, as well as by the Israeli state itself. 

But they didn’t just “propagate” it—which would have been bad enough—they enforced it! The editor of a prominent art magazine was fired for publishing a letter calling out Israel (as well as Hamas) after pressure from wealthy “patrons” of the arts. Signatories of the letter were threatened with major career damage if they didn’t withdraw their names. Major law firms publicly announced that they would refuse to hire any law students involved in the protests, and then fascist groups set about doxing activists, including driving around in trucks with giant photos of activists calling them “leading anti-Semites.” Columbia University suspended the Jewish Voice for Peace chapter on campus. Authors had readings of their books canceled and literary awards rescinded. And universities developed elaborate “speech codes” that classified criticism of Zionism as “hate speech” carrying various forms of punishment, including expulsion or firing in some cases.

This fierce back and forth continued through graduation ceremonies, dozens of which become venues for defiant students to raise the demand to end the genocide and for “Free Palestine.” Over the summer, university presidents spent their “vacation” time concocting new and more repressive rules to prevent further protests in the fall semester.

All of this was met with a wall of unified attack that “brought together” the Republi-fascists in Congress (who held hearings to drive out university administrators who failed to crush the protest ruthlessly enough) and all of the leading Democrats. Biden and Harris, senators, congressmen and mayors, all rushed to swear their allegiance to the Israeli génocidaires, to slander anti-Israel protesters as “anti-Semites,” and even as “terrorists.” 

Biden was strongly—and rightly—seen as a stalwart ally of Israel, and was the target of much of the anger and outrage of protesters. But in August, the Democrats forced him out of the presidential race, throwing their support behind Kamala Harris, who was then packaged as a representative of so-called “marginalized” people. The hope was dangled in front of people that she would break with Biden’s pro-Israel policy, and that utterly false hope, coupled with the high levels of repression of protest that goes “outside the bounds” of electoral (non) change seems to have led many pro-Palestinian forces into the trap of making the election of Harris the focus of their attention. 

Why Neither Harris Nor Biden Nor Any Other Representative of This System Can Possibly Break with or Even “Rein in” Israel, and What People Who Want Justice for Palestine and a Decent World Overall Must Do

Yet people do not gain a scientific understanding of the source of the problem—or its solution—just through participating in struggle. Of huge importance in looking back over the past year is the work of Bob Avakian (BA) in digging into the roots of this oppression, showing its source in this system, pointing to the way out and showing how other proposed solutions lead nowhere. This has been true since the first weeks of the struggle and it has continued today with consistent social media messages from BA.

Check out what Bob Avakian said last January in Revolution #7 @BobAvakianOfficial:

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.

BA has consistently hammered at the point that it is not the U.S. being “jerked around by Israel.” It is the U.S. imperialist system itself that needs to maintain its power in a key part of the world… and that is not going to change unless and until the revolutionary overthrow of that system. And the extreme nature of these times—the fierce infighting in the ruling class, the hellish future that the system as a whole is dragging us into, not just in the Middle East but worldwide—are actually creating openings for that revolution, making it more possible than at any time since at least the 1960s. And in relation to the upcoming elections, he has stressed that:

We, the people of the world, can no longer afford to allow these imperialists to continue to dominate the world and determine the destiny of humanity. They need to be overthrown as quickly as possible. And it is a scientific fact that we do not have to live this way.

If you are appalled as you should be by what this country has been and is backing and enabling in Gaza—and all the other crimes and outrages around the world—then you do have a responsibility to join with others in struggling in support of the Palestinian people and to seriously engage with what Bob Avakian is putting forward about the roots of this nightmare—and the revolutionary solution.