On the night of June 6, some six thousand Palestinian refugees—many of them children—were sleeping in classrooms of a UN school in the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza. Many had fled from Nuseirat to Rafah in May, driven by Israeli threats and bombs to what Israel claimed was a safe place. Then, as Israeli tanks, bombs, and threats drove a million people back out of Rafah, people sought shelter in the wreckage of the places they had been driven out of earlier, including Nuseirat. 

Suddenly, at least three U.S.-supplied Israeli bombs shattered the night. They crashed into classrooms where people seeking safe shelter were sleeping. The classrooms were reduced to rubble. The death toll at this posting is at least 40 including many children. Israel claimed this was a “precision” strike on “terrorists.”

Just two days later, again in Nuseirat, in an Israeli operation directed to a degree not yet fully clear by U.S. operatives, at least 274 people including at least 64 children, were slaughtered in a massive wave of death and terror that freed four Israeli hostages held by Hamas. It was one of the bloodiest days in eight months of non-stop genocidal slaughter, terror, and destruction.

The Washington Post reported,

Residential blocks were destroyed, tanks menaced the streets and grievously wounded Palestinians, some without limbs, writhed in pain on the dusty roads of the camp’s central market, according to videos and images of the raid. Many of them never reached local hospitals, health officials said. But even then, medical facilities decimated by the war often have little ability to treat injured patients.

As victims were piled into the already horrifically overwhelmed Al-Aqsa Hospital, Doctors Without Borders posted:

Following intense bombings by Israeli forces this Saturday morning in the Middle Area of #Gaza, our teams are working along medical staff at Al-Aqsa and Nasser hospitals to treat an overwhelming number of severely injured patients, many of whom are women and children. It's a nightmare at Al-Aqsa. There have been back-to-back mass casualties as densely populated areas are bombed. It’s way beyond what anyone could deal with in a functional hospital, let alone with the scarce resources we have here… In one hour, we've received about 50 badly injured patients. There are people with multiple major open fractures. We've got several unconscious children. The intensive care unit is full, and more patients are arriving.

Samuel Johann, Doctors Without Borders coordinator in Gaza, posted, “How many more men, women and children have to be killed before world leaders decide to put an end to this massacre?"

This IS Israel. This IS Zionism. I’ll return to that. But first, let’s return to the scene of the (war) crimes.

June 6: Massacre in UN School, Made in USA

Israeli bombs turned one classroom, with a black chalkboard in front, into a pile of concrete chunks mixed with blown-up kids’ desks. Mixed into the rubble were scraps of blown-to-bits children’s colorful blankets and pillows, which had provided the most minimal comfort until the bombs hit. And yes, the children sleeping there at 2 am were blown to bits as well. 

Those bombs were made in, and provided by, the United States.

As daylight came, parents gathered outside the carnage, holding each other in fear and heartbreak as rescuers attempted to find survivors and get them to Al-Aqsa Hospital. Outside the school, in a large parking area, bodies lay side-by-side. Anxious loved ones pulled aside a bit of a rug, a sheet, a blanket to check for faces they knew. Some touched their dead child’s body for the last time. Some carried the bodies of loved ones in search of a spot for a respectful burial. 

“Every place we went to after they said it’s safe was struck—I want the war to stop,” Mohammad Farajallah, a child who said his two brothers were killed in the strike, told CNN as he rifled through the rubble of the school.

Israel Calls a Massacre of Civilians Including Children “a Precise Strike Against Terrorists”

As news of the June 6 slaughter at the UN school spread, and mainstream news media showed photos of the death and described victims piling up at Al-Aqsa hospital, including children, an Israeli military spokesman said he was “not aware of any civilian casualties.” He declared, “We conducted a precise strike against the terrorists where they were.”

Children were killed in this attack. Israel is claiming these children are terrorists. Which on one level tells you all you need to know about who Israel, and its weapons-supplier the U.S., are talking about when they claim the genocidal crimes they are committing in Gaza (and in the West Bank and Jerusalem for that matter) are “precise strike(s) against the terrorists.”

Sam Rose, the director of planning for the UN refugee relief organization UNRWA, spoke to this, saying “We’ve seen this time and time again, to the extent that it’s almost become normalized. In previous conflicts, single incidents like this would cause shock and outrage and would be remembered forever. Whereas it seems in this conflict it will be this one will be replaced by another in a few days’ time unless it all comes to an end.”

What a bitter reflection of reality it was that only two days later the U.S. and Israel carried out their next massacre in Nuseirat.

June 8, 274 Dead, Hundreds More Wounded in Nuseirat

It would be hard to imagine a “hostage rescue mission” that could have been carried out with more terror, death, and injuries to civilians, and more destruction. 

Photos from Nuseirat at the time of the raid show people throughout the city running for cover as bombs rained down. After Israel unleashed airstrikes, the streets were so clogged with rubble that ambulances were unable to transport the wounded to hospitals. Photos show parents, their faces etched with unbearable panic and pain, carrying children from the wreckage to hospitals.

“Israel committed a massacre in Nuseirat,” Khalil al-Degran, spokesman for Al-Aqsa Hospital, said at a news conference on June 8. “In this terrible state … the hospital cannot absorb the number of dead and injured. The hospital has been at full capacity for weeks.”

Blaming Everyone EXCEPT the BIGGEST Criminals

According to the Times of Israel, the Israeli military blamed Hamas for the massive civilian casualties because hostages were being held “in a dense civilian environment.” While taking civilian hostages is a war crime, the idea that Hamas is to blame for this scale of civilian casualties is ludicrous. That “dense civilian environment” is Gaza, where for eight months, over two million people packed into a 25-mile by seven-mile strip of land have been bombed out of their homes, starved, deprived of any way to live, driven from place to place, sheltering in packed, side-by-side in tents and inside hospitals. 

In a message responding to the operation, U.S. Secretary of State Blinken did not even mention the massive Palestinian casualties. To this orchestrator of mass murder, this embodiment of the interests of U.S. imperialism, the horrific toll in civilian lives was just something to celebrate.

The specific hand of the U.S. in the slaughter is not clear, but it has been widely reported in the U.S. mainstream media that U.S. “intelligence” operatives on the ground in Israel helped plan the carnage.

These Are War Crimes, but This Is NOT a “War”—It Is U.S.-Enabled Genocide

An Independent Task Force report produced by experts including Josh Paul, a former U.S. State Department official who in October resigned in protest over U.S. military support for Israel, documented that Israel’s policy is to seize on (or much more often make up) any presence of or activity by Hamas to carry out massacres of Palestinian civilians in Gaza. And that the U.S. unconditionally enables this.

That report, based on careful examination of evidence, concluded that “these patterns of unlawful attacks reflect reliance on an unyielding and unconditioned supply of U.S. weapons, relaxed rules of engagement, application of collective punishment (of the Palestinian people in Gaza)” (boldface added) (See War Crimes Enabled and Whited Out by USA State Department.)

June 6 and June 8 in Nuseirat were the latest horrific war crimes in that pattern.

“I Stand with Israel” = I Stand for Genocide

Before October 7, there were over 80,000 people packed into the crowded housing that is—or was—the Nuseirat refugee camp where Israel bombed the UN school on June 6. The camp, adjacent to the city of Nuseirat, is a refugee camp because its inhabitants are Palestinian people driven from their homes by the terrorist ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948—the Nakba (Arabic for catastrophe)—and their descendants. That genocidal dispossession of over 750,000 Palestinians was the foundation for the Zionist state of Israel. And the logic of an apartheid state, literally built on the blood and bones of the Palestinian people, is driving escalating genocide right now.

As revcom.us has analyzed, Israel seized on Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel—which included the war crimes of taking hostages and the murder of civilians—to attempt to deal with what Israel’s rulers see as an existential threat. That is: in the area now ruled by Israel (the state of Israel and territory it occupies), Jews are a minority. Israel’s objective in the current genocidal assault on Gaza is to reduce the Palestinians to such a state that they can no longer pose any threat to Israel’s existence as an apartheid, Jewish-supremacist state. 

There is an obscene morality that defines the arguments of defenders of Israel. When push comes to shove, if you are “standing with Israel,” there is no crime that Israel carries out that you will not defend. If you don’t believe me, ask defenders of Israel what line Israel would have to cross in order for them to refuse to defend its crimes. They will not and cannot draw that line.

This IS Zionism, This IS Israel

It may come as a surprise for people who have been reading this article so far, or to people who have read my other articles at revcom.us or seen me on The RNL—Revolution, Nothing Less!—Show, but growing up, I identified with Israel. I believed, and felt, that the State of Israel was part of the fight against oppression. 

At the same time, I was raised to see that Jewish people, who had gone through the mass slaughter of Jews that took place during the Holocaust, had a special responsibility to stand with the struggle of Black people in America for equality. When I was young, two Jewish and one Black civil rights activist were murdered by the KKK in Mississippi for registering Black people to vote. One of them was Andrew Goodman (no relation), a Jewish kid from Queens who was just 21 years old. I saw him as a role model, someone who put his life on the line for something right, and important. But in my mind at the time, Israel was also part of a big picture of oppressed people getting free because it guaranteed that Jewish people could not be the victims of another Holocaust. 

Right about the time that the three civil rights workers were killed in Mississippi, the teacher in my Saturday School class (Jewish people celebrate Saturday as the sabbath) told us that Israel was supporting apartheid South Africa. He justified this by explaining that under apartheid, non-whites were classified as either Black or “colored,” and that if the State of Israel didn’t support Apartheid South Africa, the white supremacist rulers of that country would reclassify Jews from “white” to “colored.” 

I was appalled! I blurted out, “Why would we want to be white!?” I felt like this “bargain” was selling our souls to the devil for a promise of a place of supposed “safety” in a world of oppression. 

Let’s put it this way: in the decades since, my understanding of that world of oppression, and Israel’s pivotal role in enforcing it, have become more scientific. But nothing I have seen in the decades since has in any way contradicted what went through my mind at that moment! Or changed my conclusion that support for Israel is morally unconscionable. 

Speaking of coming to understand all this scientifically, in his social media message #48, Liberalism, “progressivism”—opposition to injustice—and Zionism: you can’t “have it all”—you can’t hold on to Zionism...and be consistent in opposing injustice and atrocity, Bob Avakian, revolutionary leader, author of the new communism, poses this reality, and challenge:

For all those who are determined to stand and act consistently against injustice and oppression, it is necessary to fully break with any illusions that you can do so while still supporting Israel, since “the right of Israel to defend itself”—and indeed its right to exist as a Zionist state—has always meant, and will always mean, terrible oppression and atrocities brought down on the Palestinian people, which is now being carried to horrific genocidal dimensions.

As I have emphasized in these messages:

The answer is definitely not to “kill off all the Jews in Israel” or “drive them into the sea.” The answer is the abolition of the state of Israel, and in its place the creation of a revolutionary state in which the government and the laws do not promote any religion and do not favor one people over another, and instead there is equality between Jews and Palestinians.

The answer is also definitely not the “two-state solution” being promoted by the Biden administration. Such a “two-state solution” would really amount to nothing more than a powerful state of Israel continuing to occupy land stolen from the Palestinian people, while the so-called “Palestinian state” created with this “solution” would be a bitter joke—a puppet state—merely a patchwork of separated small territories, surrounded and dominated by Israel, with the Palestinian people still subjected to terrible oppression and deprivation.

The answer is that the fight against the state of Israel must be waged on a revolutionary basis, with the goal of putting an end to all oppressive relations and all inequality among people based on race and nationality, sex and gender, and all relations in which one part of society exploits others. And the urgent need is for a revolutionary force to emerge to lead the struggle on that basis.

As difficult as it may be to achieve this solution, it cannot be dismissed by declaring it “unrealistic.” How “realistic” is it to think that the profound contradictions involved can be positively resolved in any other way? And, right now, how “realistic” is it to think that anyone can take a principled, firm and consistent stand against injustice and atrocity while continuing to support the state of Israel, or its “right to exist” as a Zionist state?—which is the only way the state of Israel can exist!