As this is written, the people of Gaza are cut off from the world, starving, terrorized, and dying from Israeli bombs—over 6,000 in just the first week—and a genocidal Israeli blockade of food, water, and medicine. Gaza is a tiny piece of land packed with over two million Palestinians—descendants of a people driven from their homeland by the Nakba (Arabic for catastrophe), Israeli massacres in 1948 that created the state of Israel. 

Israel says it is responding to the October 7 attack by Hamas, the Islamic fundamentalist force that rules Gaza. Hamas's targeting of civilians was reactionary. That comes from and serves their reactionary outlook (see “What Is Hamas?” at revcom.us). But what Israel is doing is war crimes on an immensely bigger scale. Israel’s vengeance is being unleashed on the entire population of Gaza. 

Israel’s current slaughter of civilians comes after more than 15 years of a U.S.-backed Israeli blockade that has crippled Gaza’s economy. Water and sewage systems are in a state of collapse. Medical care is decimated. Farmers and fishermen are shot and killed by Israel as they work to feed a besieged population. Under this siege, most people in Gaza subsisted on donated aid that came in part through deliveries by 400 trucks a day. After the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, Israel completely shut down the deliveries of food, water, and medical supplies. This includes not only supplies from Israel, but Israel has also shut down the small Rafah crossing that connects Gaza with neighboring Egypt. 

As the humanitarian crisis in Gaza shocks the world, at least those with eyes to see and hearts to feel, Israel has made vague promises that aid would be allowed into Gaza. For days, Israel has blocked 200 trucks with food, water, and medicine at the Rafah crossing. On October 21, after two weeks of starving the population, in an act of sadistic depravity Israel allowed just 20 trucks into Gaza. Those trucks were carrying 44,000 bottles of drinking water—only enough for 22,000 people for a single day.

“The situation is catastrophic in Gaza,” the head of the U.N.’s World Food Program, Cindy McCain, told the Associated Press. “We need many, many, many more trucks and a continual flow of aid," she said.

Ratcheting Up Death and Terror in Preparation for a Ground Invasion

Israel has massed hundreds of thousands of troops along with fleets of tanks on its border with Gaza, and is warning that a ground invasion is imminent. As this is written, even before a ground invasion, the scale and frequency of Israel’s missile and bomb assault on Gaza is intensifying. 

An Al Jazeera reporter in Gaza City, Gaza’s largest city, said residents had been receiving phone calls saying they would be considered “a collaborator with terrorism if they do not evacuate the city.” Leaflets dropped by Israel in northern Gaza also said those who did not leave could be viewed as collaborators with a “terrorist group.” Israel’s official statements “denying” these reports only called them “imprecise.” (!)

Gaza is already a free-fire zone for Israeli bombs and missiles—meaning an area in which any moving thing is a “legitimate” target. The overwhelming majority of the thousands of people already massacred by Israel are non-combatants, including 1,756 children. But now, Israeli officials are promising even worse. 

Many, if not most, of the residents of Gaza City and the northern half of the Gaza Strip who attempted to follow Israeli orders and flee to the southern half were unable to do so, or were attacked by Israeli bombardment while trying to leave. Or they found no food, water, places to sleep or medical care in southern Gaza and decided to return to and die in their homes in the north, if that is what it comes to.

A Ground Invasion Would Be an Historic, Genocidal War Crime

Gaza, and in particular Gaza City, is a densely packed ghetto.¹ A ground invasion of Gaza by Israel would be an almost unfathomable war crime on top of ongoing war crimes. 

An article in the Washington Post, What a ground war in Gaza could look like, paints a scenario of a very long, massively deadly and horrific slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza. The Post piece frames that slaughter, suffering and death as being entirely the fault of Hamas and, by implication, every Palestinian living in Gaza, or at least the areas that would be ravaged by Israel, for being “in the way” (my characterization) of the slaughter. But setting aside that upside-down framework (basically blaming the Palestinians in Gaza for being alive and therefore being in Israel’s way), the article does give a sense of unimaginable and maybe unprecedented death and devastation.

A military expert interviewed by the Post said, “The dense urban nature of the [Gaza Strip] will ensure that such an operation will face fierce resistance and will require massive use of force by Israel.”

To break that down: Because Gaza City is so densely packed, and because Hamas forces are likely deeply embedded in buildings and the massive piles of concrete rubble produced by Israeli bombs, Israeli troops would have to fight any resistance block by block. On the one hand, that would limit Israel’s ability to continue to simply bomb Gaza into submission (there would be more danger of the Israelis killing their own troops if that continued in the almost random rain of death that is currently going on). On the other hand, house-by-house, block-by-block fighting would—given the genocidal objectives and nature of the Israeli military—create necessity for Israeli troops to shoot anything that moves, non-combatants, medical workers, attempts at bringing food and water to the populace, ordinary civilians hiding and trying to survive, women, children and babies who have nowhere to flee to. And it would involve killing people who may, under the circumstances, wage different forms of resistance to an Israeli blitzkrieg, not necessarily in unity with Hamas. 

The Post article cites (reactionary) military strategist and historian Edward Luttwak to assert that Hamas operates out of tunnels as deep as 300 feet underground, with the deepest tunnels being where Hamas leaders live and work. Given Israel’s declared intention to kill all Hamas leaders, and the extreme difficulty (and risk to Israeli soldiers) of attempting to carry that out with ground troops, Israel would face a need to use massively destructive bombs to destroy Hamas’s command structure.

With obscene understatement, the Post piece notes, “Destroying tunnels from the air could once again mean putting civilians in harm’s way.”

And the U.S. military is advising the Israeli military on how to effectively wage mass slaughter in Gaza: An article in the New York Times reported that “American military officers with vivid memories of the fights for Falluja, Iraq, in 2004—a six-week struggle against Iraqi insurgents that was some of the most intense urban combat of modern times—have been conveying the lessons of that battle … to their Israeli counterparts.”

A pivotal battle in the U.S. war in Iraq was the 2004 invasion of the Iraqi city of Fallujah. The American ground assault came after U.S. troops had cut off all entry into and exit from Fallujah and poured in thousands of artillery rounds, hundreds of rockets, bombs, and missiles, and nearly 100,000 machine gun and cannon rounds into this densely populated city. Then came the armored bulldozers that tore up all the main streets of the city and troops that shot at anything that moved, going “house to house, room to room, raining death and destruction,” according to one news report. As the assault was going on, then-U.S. President George W. Bush told a gathering of top military commanders: “Kick ass! If somebody tries to stop the march to democracy, we will seek them out and kill them!... We are going to wipe them out! We are not blinking!”²

This is the American way of fighting, being shared with Israel in preparation for its ground invasion of Gaza. And even beyond what happened to the people in Fallujah, some of whom were able to escape before the city was entirely destroyed, an Israeli invasion of Gaza would target more than two million people who have nowhere to flee to. 

Nobody, including Israel, knows what will happen when it launches its assault. What will other regional powers do? What will the Palestinians do—those grouped under Hamas but also those who do not affiliate with Hamas but hate oppression and will fight bravely when under attack? What IS known is that the Israeli assault will be severely brutal and on a whole other order of the genocidal assaults they've launched in years past. 

Biden “Denounces” Terrorism While Embracing the Biggest Terrorists

Immediately after the October 7 attack by Hamas, and as Israel began to unleash genocidal revenge, Biden declared “I made clear to Prime Minister Netanyahu that we stand ready to offer all appropriate means of support to the Government and people of Israel. Terrorism is never justified. Israel has a right to defend itself and its people. The United States warns against any other party hostile to Israel seeking advantage in this situation.  My Administration’s support for Israel’s security is rock solid and unwavering.”

Two weeks into “rock solid and unwavering” support for Israel’s siege and slaughter of Gaza, Biden flew into Israel where he literally hugged Israel’s rabidly racist, genocidal, fascist Prime Minister Netanyahu. And Biden politically, morally, economically, and militarily embraced Israel’s ongoing slaughter of the Palestinian people.

Biden invoked the immoral mantra that the Holocaust, the Nazi slaughter of millions of Jews up to and during World War II, justified anything Israel does (“We will not stand by and do nothing again.  Not today, not tomorrow, not ever.”). 

In Israel, Biden proclaimed, “Like the United States, you [the State of Israel] don’t live by the rules of terrorists. You live by the rule of law... What sets us apart from the terrorists [sic] is we believe in the fundamental dignity of every human life—Israeli, Palestinian, Arab, Jew, Muslim, Christian—everyone.” 

No, Biden. What sets you apart from “the terrorists” you condemn is that the scale, the depth, the depravity of your crimes against humanity are on a level the Islamic fundamentalist terrorists can only dream of.

And Biden managed to condemn “Children slaughtered. Babies slaughtered. Entire families massacred.” Without acknowledging that in just two weeks, Israel has already killed three times as many more Palestinian people, overwhelmingly civilians, in Gaza than was done to people in Israel by Hamas on October 7.

Much has been made in the mainstream (ruling class) media of Biden’s “counseling” Israel with lessons on how to “avoid mistakes” that the U.S. made after September 11, 2001 (“9/11”) when Islamic jihadist terrorist attacks killed some 3,000 people in the U.S. 

This is a bullshit pretense. That war was not driven by a desire for revenge, it was the cold calculations of imperialism. The so-called “war on terror” was a war for empire, based on lies, led to the deaths of 4.5 million people, devastated the Middle East and beyond, and was a critical factor in the spread of Islamic fundamentalism. 

Biden Bundles Slaughter in Israel, Ukraine as Critical to the U.S. Empire

In a rare address to the American public, on his return from Israel, Biden declared that “making sure Israel and Ukraine succeed is vital for America’s national security.” 

Obviously, neither Hamas or Russia (which criminally invaded Ukraine, launching a war that quickly became a proxy war between U.S. capitalism-imperialism and their Russian rivals) is on the verge of invading the United States. So, what is Biden talking about when he attempts to rally people behind these wars, and his call for over $75 billion in new money to drastically ratchet up the death toll in Ukraine and pump up Israel’s military capacity right now?

On Ukraine, Biden warned that “we know that our allies and, maybe most importantly, our adversaries and competitors are watching.” And in the Middle East, he focused on the challenge to U.S. domination from Iran and allied forces.

Biden’s bottom line: “American leadership is what holds the world together. American alliances are what keep us, America, safe. American values are what make us a partner that other nations want to work with. To put all that at risk if we walk away from Ukraine, if we turn our backs on Israel, it’s just not worth it.”³

Or, as the headline of an opinion piece by the editors of the Washington Post put it, in crude terms, and from the perspective of the U.S. capitalist-imperialist ruling class: “Investing in Ukraine and Israel is in our cold, hard national interest.”⁴

I have to be succinct here and strongly advise readers to tune into The RNL—Revolution, Nothing Less!—Show on YouTube, and revcom.us, to learn more. But here’s what you need to know and act on now: The world that Biden is talking about is “held together” by U.S. imperialism's death machinery. It is a  world of environmental plunder and devastation. 

When Biden talks about sending a message to “adversaries” and “competitors” contending with the U.S. rulers to dominate that world, he is talking about threatening and radically escalating the risk of much larger wars! Even nuclear wars!⁵

An Israeli ground invasion, which appears imminent, would quickly become a hell within a hell. It would provoke global outrage. All the regional and global powers (Iran, Russia, and China, and then smaller players within that) have a stake in the conflict and back different sides. Because of that, and other factors, there is a tremendous danger that in the context of a world on the edge, an Israeli ground invasion could trigger a broader war in the region, and even beyond. Already, the Iranian-backed, heavily armed Islamic fundamentalist Hezbollah organization in southern Lebanon (on Israel’s northern border, Gaza is on Israel’s south) is engaged in missile exchanges with Israel.

Even with all these risks and dangers, the rulers of the U.S. depend on Israel as a unique asset in enforcing U.S. domination of this world and its peoples. That has always been why the U.S. rulers have backed Israel despite global condemnation of its apartheid oppression of the Palestinians. The U.S. even enabled Israel to build up its own nuclear arsenal.

Forget all that bullshit from Biden about how his heart is with the Jewish people who suffered so much in the Holocaust. U.S. backing for Israel has nothing to do with that. It is all about enforcing U.S. domination of the Middle East. And Biden has been as rabid a backer of Israel as there is, going way back (he lays that all out in a clip that is part of coverage of the current crisis on The RNL—Revolution, Nothing Less!—Show).

And here’s a critical point: Biden, and anyone supporting Israel is not doing Jewish people any favors! Bob Avakian,⁶ revolutionary leader, author and architect of a whole new framework for human emancipation: the new communism, has put this provocatively and truthfully (think about it):

After the Holocaust, the worst thing that has happened to Jewish people is the State of Israel.

If, and when, Israel begins its ground invasion into Gaza, the sharp polarization and divisions in society will intensify. It is also likely that the demonstrations that have marked the last two weeks—on college campuses and in cities around the world—will grow, and will be part of the tremendous turmoil throughout society. I strongly encourage readers to seriously dig into this piece from Bob Avakian for how to move masses of people with a real, revolutionary, understanding of this urgent situation: For the Revcoms, Including People In And Around the Revolution Clubs, PALESTINE, ISRAEL, IMPERIALISM: WAR, THE DANGER OF EVEN GREATER WAR—AND REVOLUTION, BASIC ORIENTATION, COMPELLING AGITATION AND MOVING MASSES.