Genocide Joe Biden and the U.S. imperialists are providing Israel with military and financial support for its planned “full-scale ground offensive” against Rafah, the last, desperate refuge for more than 1.5 million Palestinians in Gaza! The United Nations humanitarian chief warns such “military operations in Rafah could lead to a slaughter in Gaza.”1
Dear Readers:
What you’re about to read—and you SHOULD and MUST read it—will tell you about a crime. A crime not being carried out by a deranged or especially racist set of people, but a people molded by a system and the specific roles they are designed to play in that system. A crime that is far from unique in this system’s history, even in just the past 70 years—from its 1945 nuclear incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, to the two to three million Vietnamese, Cambodians and Laotians slaughtered during the 1961-75 Vietnam War, to the more than 1,000 people, disproportionately of color, that are murdered by police in this country every year!
As you read this article, consider: there is a chance now unfolding. A chance to actually overthrow the system responsible for these crimes, to stop these crimes at the source, and make a giant leap to a whole new world where all of that in every country is NO MORE. But this rare chance won’t last forever.
So decide: Will you not only join in urgently fighting to stop this genocidal slaughter now, but will you make your efforts in that fight serve the larger struggle of overthrowing U.S. imperialism and emancipating all of humanity? And if you already are doing that, will you go out to fight with others to do the same? And will you do it as if the people of the world depend on it?
Because they do.
February 12, 2024 Israeli bombardment of the Gaza Strip killed dozens of Palestinians including the child of this family in Rafah. Photo: AP
Life in Rafah—Already Unimaginable and Unlivable
Life in Rafah right now is unimaginable and unlivable. Israel’s threatened assault on the city has not yet taken place. But the genocidal war that has already taken more than 29,000 lives continues across Gaza. In Rafah it looms more ominously by the day.2 People are being tortured by desperation, uncertainty, the terrifying threat of what’s to come, and the utter hopelessness of their situation.
Rafah is located on Gaza’s southern border with Egypt. It used to be a city of 275,000. Now more than a million Palestinians have fled there, displaced by Israel’s ceaseless killings and destruction of the rest of Gaza and its hollow promises of safety. Nearly 70 percent of Gaza’s 2.3 million people are living or sheltering in and around Rafah.
Rafah, Gaza: Destruction from Israeli airstrike on a residential building, February 16, 2024. Photo: AP
Conditions are dire. Rafah is now the most densely populated area on the planet. People are crammed together, mostly in tents and makeshift shelters, often cobbled together from discarded scraps. Some are lucky enough to be packed into a relative’s home. There is no clean water. There is no fresh food. There is no medicine. Hunger, even starvation, and disease are rampant. Barely a trickle of aid is getting through. People desperately hope that some global power or institution will take notice and come to their aid, but none can or will.
One Palestinian journalist told Democracy Now!:
Every single time I walk one step in Gaza, I always imagine myself being blown up…. [The people] have been struggling. They have been facing famine. They have been seeing children who are dying from the hunger. And this is an outcry from them to the whole world that this needs to stop. The number of people killed, and the way they are being killed, is also unconceivable. And people continue to suffer.3
February 13, 2024: The sole survivor of a family of eight, including three children, stands on the debris of his home in Rafah, bombed by an Israeli airstrike supposedly meant to rescue Hamas-held Israeli hostages who were in another part of town. Photo: AP
Israel’s Bloody Assault on Nasser Hospital
Two days after Israel’s raid in Rafah, it brutally attacked the largest and one of the few functioning hospitals in Gaza—Nasser Hospital in the nearby city of Khan Younis.
More than 400 patients, including about 80 in intensive care, had been in the hospital, as well as medical personnel. Some 8,000 displaced Palestinians have been sheltering in the compound. Israel claimed it was “a precise and limited operation” to find Hamas fighters hiding there and perhaps the bodies of hostages. Instead, thousands were again displaced, abused, and traumatized. An Israeli missile strike killed one patient and wounded six others, and eight patients died when the hospital's power was cut off and they lost oxygen. It is also being reported that Israeli snipers shot a number of people dead as they tried to flee the hospital.4
After forcing most of the people in the compound to evacuate, Israel’s military smashed its way into the hospital, demolishing its southern wall. Explosions and gunfire from tanks, snipers, and drones rocked the hospital. One doctor reported a colleague was shot in the head. Several were killed or wounded including at least one doctor and a patient.5
The Israelis targeted ambulances and tents housing the displaced. They bulldozed mass graves people had been forced to dig inside the hospital compound. “Around 80 bodies are laid right in front of the outer gate of the Nasser Hospital, up to some 200 meters away from the hospital. Fear, death and shock are enclaving and encircling the people in that area,” one eyewitness reported.6
The raid left Nasser Hospital and Medical Center barely functional—this when more and more Palestinians urgently need medical care. Israel has deliberately murdered patients and medical personnel, blocked fuel, medicines and other needed essentials, and damaged or destroyed two-thirds of Gaza’s 36 hospitals, leaving only 11 partially functioning.7
Genocide Joe Responds with Double-Talk, Lies, and $14 Billion More Bombs and Shells for Killing Palestinians
Recently Biden has been talking a lot about how much he cares about Palestinians, how too many civilians have died, and how very concerned he is about a possible Israeli assault on Rafah:
“Too many—too many of the more than 27,000 Palestinians killed in this conflict have been innocent civilians and children, including thousands of children. And hundreds of thousands have no access to food, water, or other basic services,” he said on February 12. “Many families have lost not just one but many relatives and cannot mourn for them or even bury them because it’s not safe to do so. It’s heart-breaking.”8
Meanwhile, Biden has been stepping up and reaffirming U.S. support for Israel’s genocidal war:
- “I’ve made clear the United States shares the goal of seeing Hamas defeated and ensuring long-term security for Israel and its people,” he declared this past week.
- He continues to reject the idea of a general cease-fire, saying Israel has “a right to defend itself.” (See Bob Avakian’s social media dispatch REVOLUTION Number Six on why, as an illegitimate state, Israel has no “right to self-defense.”)
- He does not oppose an attack on Rafah so long as Israel at least presents a “credible and executable plan for ensuring the safety and support for the more than one million people sheltering there.”
- With the assault on Rafah looming, he recently pushed the Senate to pass an emergency defense spending bill which includes an additional $14 billion in military aid for Israel. This bill imposes no conditions on Israel’s use of this aid, and the Biden administration has repeatedly made clear that it will not take action against Israel if it does not heed its advice on Rafah. This equals a bright green light for Israel’s planned attack on Rafah (even as the U.S. has some secondary differences with Israel over how to conduct it).9
Genocide Joe: Helping Starve the Children of Gaza
Biden recently bragged about how much humanitarian aid he’d supposedly been getting into Gaza: “From the very beginning, my team and I have relentlessly worked to get more aid in…”
Reality check:
Because of Israel’s siege blockading food, water, medicine, fuel and other basic goods and attacks on food sources and production, Gaza now has the highest percentage of people facing acute food shortages and hunger anywhere in the world. The United Nations warns Gaza is on the brink of famine. More than a million children are facing starvation, and rising hunger is "turning children into skeletons," potentially permanently harming them for their entire lives.10
What starving people in Gaza sometimes eat—animal feed and straw, sometimes mixed with dirt. Photo: Mosab Abu Toha IG
The Wire reports, “Families in Gaza are now running out of even the animal and bird feed that they were forced to bake into bread. Many are forced to consume inedible things, like dirt, and clean water is incredibly scarce. Meanwhile, Israeli soldiers burn and destroy food warehouses in Gaza City—and proudly post videos to social media of themselves doing so.”11
- Yet Biden has never demanded Israel lift this blockade.
- Biden and the U.S. have supported Israel’s smear campaign against UNRWA (the United Nations Relief and Works Agency), and immediately cut off aid and encouraged others to do likewise. This has cost UNRWA $450 million in this year’s funding, a devastating blow to its ability to feed the people of Gaza!12
- The Senate’s emergency defense spending bill, which gave Israel another $14 billion in military aid, also contained a prohibition on any funding for UNRWA—the main organization that gets food, water, medicines and other life-saving aid into Gaza! (The bill also contained a provision for $9 billion in humanitarian aid for Gaza, the West Bank, and Ukraine, although it's not clear how much will be allocated for each or who will be distributing the aid.)
The U.S. and Israel—Illegitimate Mass Murderers Enforcing an Illegitimate System
Each and every day, crimes of immeasurable magnitude pile up. Go back to where we started: what's driving this is not evil, greed, or the supposed “power of the Jews.” What's driving this are the dictates of this system of capitalism-imperialism. A vicious, outmoded and illegitimate system—a system that should not be allowed to rule for one more day. A system that needs to be... that can be... overthrown through an actual revolution to bring a different system into being.
Because of the sharpening divides throughout this whole society, we have a rare opening to make this revolution. A precious opening to get this system off the backs of the people of the world. Everyone needs to be part of acting to stop this genocidal slaughter! And for that action to be guided by a strategic approach to making a real revolution in this time, with the goal of a whole new way to live, and a fundamentally different system.
A key part of that approach—Fight the Power, and Transform the People, for Revolution—includes involving masses of people in rising up to resist the continuing crimes of this system, while exposing the source of the problem and the solution to it. The achingly intense struggle now going down in Gaza is one of those crimes.
Again, will you step into this now as if the people of the world depend on it?
Because they do.
Why is Biden enabling such a monstrous, historic genocide and crime against humanity?
The revolutionary leader and author of the new communism, Bob Avakian, answers this question in his REVOLUTION Number Seven social media dispatch:
In the face of all the lies, it is crucial to keep coming back to this basic, essential reality: Here is the entire ruling class of the U.S., and all its major politicians, both Democrat and Republican, fully supporting an apartheid state, Israel, carrying out the genocidal slaughter of Palestinians in front of the whole world.
And for those of you who think that politicians just act in their own narrow personal interests, think deeper—think about this: Biden has not only been a long-time fanatical backer of Israel, with its terrible crimes against humanity, but now Biden is fully supporting the genocide being carried out by Israel, even though this is likely to cost Biden the votes of large numbers of people who are righteously outraged by this genocide, and this could end up costing Biden the election. (And don’t be fooled by Biden putting on the act of telling Israel to be more careful in killing civilians—Biden has continued to send military aid to Israel, and to provide it with “political and diplomatic cover,” as the bodies of Palestinian civilians massacred by Israel pile up in the tens of thousands.)
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.
Dig into and spread Bob Avakian on social media so people have a real understanding of the problem... and the solution!
REVOLUTION Number Seven
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