"The conditions in the north of Gaza are holocaust conditions.”

This is from a report from someone on the ground in Gaza posted by veteran reporter Seymour Hersh on November 20. (Hersh became famous for exposing U.S. war crimes in Vietnam.) The report he cites sheds a cold, hard light on the situation.

The crimes against humanity described in these revelations about the situation in Gaza pose a critical analogy (comparison) to another world-historic crime against humanity. That is the Nazi Holocaust. From the late 1930s until 1945, a fascist regime in capitalist-imperialist Germany systematically murdered millions of Jews in Europe. The Nazis essentially “cleansed” Europe of a people whose existence there went back a thousand years.

And that analogy represents a painful historic irony and poses the urgent question of what we should do now.

I’ll return to that after you confront some revelations from an on-the-ground report from Gaza.

Holocaust Conditions

The report from Gaza shared by Seymour Hersh opens with this:

The conditions in the north of Gaza are holocaust conditions. We don’t use the word because it has a special place in the Western imagination and heart, but this is a holocaust in terms of collective punishment and dehumanization and the technical tools. But is it a holocaust eighty years later being done remotely and on people’s bodies.... A missile is dropped in a densely populated civilian area, tents mostly, and then you have drones coming in afterward to pick off people one by one. We didn’t have drones during World War II, but we do now, and the logic is pretty much the same.

Later, the report paints a picture of the sadistic, cruel terror and death perpetrated against the people in north Gaza.

… Palestinians living in north Gaza will either be exterminated en masse, as they are now, or they will be pushed south where they are humiliated and stripped and tortured and have to endure unbearable conditions. Anyone I speak to who recently came from the north to the south describes the horrid condition of having their children taken away from them.... Children are being lined up on one side, and the Gazans are told to pick up a random child and go with that child to the south even if it’s not their child... and not knowing if your child made it. These kinds of horrific tearing of the social fabric are happening.

Trying to Smash a Population from Existence

While this same systematic mass murder is not happening, yet, in the south of Gaza, the report reveals:

Meanwhile in the south, where there once was food but no cleaning materials, there is now no food. The Israelis are likely preparing to gather everybody into specific pockets in the south. So it is not only about annexing the north but it’s also about concentrating the population in specific pockets in the south.

The report documents how, under unbearable conditions, the Palestinian people trapped in Gaza persist in helping each other survive, finding ways to grow and distribute food, and fight to maintain their humanity and identity. It then speaks to how that very humanity and identity is being targeted by Israel:

[That is] why the Israelis are constantly bombing, bombing, and smashing things... the tents and refugee camps that are built all over Gaza now, in addition to what already existed. Israel is going after the refugees and the camps because they see after eight decades of doing what they did that these are places of memory and history and organizing and identity, and that is what they are trying to smash. Right? When you are trying to smash a population from existence that is what you go after. 

A Terrible Twist of History

In his social media messages, Bob Avakian (BA), revolutionary leader and author of the new communism talks about the horrible irony in this just comparison of what happened to the Jews in Germany to what Israeli's are doing to the Palestinian people. In Revolution #5, Israel and Palestine: A terrible ironic twist of history, he says:

What a terrible ironic twist of history: For centuries Jews were subjected to horrendous atrocity, and this reached its most terrible dimensions in the Holocaust, when millions of Jews were murdered by the Nazis during World War 2; but then Israel was founded and has been maintained as a Zionist (Jewish-supremacist) state on the basis of bloody oppression of the Palestinian people! This is why I have made the provocative but profoundly true statement: After the Holocaust, the worst thing that has happened to Jewish people is the state of Israel.

As someone who grew up Jewish in the years after the Nazi Holocaust, who came to understand how this whole history of oppression has been used by some Jewish people to justify oppression, I refuse to allow the experience of Jewish people, and the Nazi Holocaust to be invoked to justify Israel and the genocide it is carrying out against the Palestinian people, to the point now of another Holocaust.

Never again has to mean never again for everyone!

What Would You Have Done? What Is Needed Here and Now…

Everything you just read about what is going on in Gaza is funded, armed, and in every other way enabled by the United States. 

Which brings us back to lessons from the most relevant analogy in modern history: the Nazi Holocaust that wiped out the Jews in Europe. Far too many “Good Germans” were disgusted by what was going on but shamefully averted their eyes and stood by in the face of a genocide. There was also courageous resistance, but that resistance was not sufficient, and not guided and framed by what it would have actually taken to STOP the Nazis and their genocide against the Jews (and other horrific crimes against humanity).¹

What needed to happen then and there, and what needs to happen here and now, is resistance aimed at STOPPING the genocide in Gaza... resistance that grows deeper and broader in the face of repression... resistance where people are opening up serious debate about the source of the problem and the solution.

And ultimately and fundamentally, what is needed is a revolution to overthrow the capitalist-imperialist system that is driving this U.S.-backed Israeli genocide of Palestinian people.

This challenge is particularly urgent now as we confront the coming to power of a fascist regime in the U.S., with Trump urging Israel to ignore world outrage and “finish the job” in Gaza.

There is a basis for an actual revolution in the very workings of this system that have brought us to this time and place. And a blueprint for a radically different and better system. One dimension of that fundamentally different system is that, instead of enforcing exploitation and oppression throughout the world, it will “support people throughout the world fighting for the goal of emancipation.” 

You will find the science behind all this in the work of Bob Avakian (BA). (You can start with A basic introduction: Real Revolution, In This Time: What the Powers-That-Be Don't Want You to Know in BA’s social media messages.) And thanks to decades of work, and ongoing timely leadership from BA, there is a scientifically based strategy and path for that revolution in these dark times.

Start to get with that by following and spreading the social media messages from Bob Avakian @BobAvakianOfficial on any social media platform.