Dave Stockton
For nearly two years, Israel has been conducting a war of annihilation against the 2.3 million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. Over 90% of Gazans have been displaced multiple times from one bogus safe zone to another since October 2023.
In May this year, Netanyahu’s security cabinet approved Operation Gideon’s Chariots, aimed at re-occupying 75% of the Gaza Strip and forcing the remaining population of Gaza City to flee south. In August, this went into overdrive, taking advantage of Trump’s unlimited support.
An Israeli official explained it would entail ‘the conquest of the Gaza Strip and the holding of the territories’, that ‘Gaza will be entirely destroyed’, and that its Palestinian population will ‘leave in great numbers to third countries’.
US President Donald Trump is totally complicit in this genocide. Soon after he entered the White House, he announced a plan to clear Gaza of its people and turn its ‘very valuable waterfront property’ into a ‘Middle Eastern Riviera’.
On 27 August, a White House conference was staged with Tony Blair, disgraced co-initiator of the Iraq War, and Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, real estate speculator and negotiator of the Abraham Accords. At this event, Trump showed an AI-generated video depicting the Strip as a luxury beach resort named ‘Trump Gaza’, complete with skyscrapers, palatial hotels and a towering golden statue of himself.
Starvation
Meanwhile in the real Gaza, the population has been deliberately deprived of food and clean water, producing famine and spreading waterborne diseases. According to the Integrated IPC Food Policy Classification, over half a million people are facing ‘starvation, destitution and death’.
Between now and June 2026 at least 132,000 children under five will suffer from acute malnutrition. This Autumn, ‘nearly a third of the population (641,000 people) is expected to face catastrophic conditions’ (IPC Phase 5), while those in emergency (IPC Phase 4) will likely rise to 1.14 million (58%)’. The situation is projected to worsen rapidly.
In the shrinking zones where they are told by the IDF to seek refuge, women, children and the elderly are traumatised by swarms of drones which can drop bombs on them without warning. The IDF has targeted hospitals and medical facilities with an unprecedented deliberate killing of medical personnel, aid workers, and journalists. It has blocked lorries bringing aid from a whole range of international agencies.
By barring Unwra and others, and by forcing the closure of 400 feeding centres which they cynically accused of being a cover for Hamas, a deliberate famine is spreading. The four Israeli-US Gaza Humanitarian Foundation centres which replaced them soon became killing zones. More than 1,300 people have been gunned down at GHF sites by the IDF and American mercenaries since 27 May—729 people in July alone.
Meanwhile, in the West Bank and Jerusalem attacks by armed settlers, backed by the IDF, are driving out Palestinian villagers, burning their crops, felling olive groves, and murdering those who protest. The E1 Plan has been resurrected and put into action by Bezalel Smotrich, creating a crescent of Israeli settlements around East Jerusalem to divide it from the rest of the West Bank and its Palestinian population.
Smotrich responded to France, Australia, the UK and Canada threatening to recognise a Palestinian state saying, ‘They will talk about a Palestinian dream, and we will continue to build a Jewish reality. This reality is what will permanently bury the idea of a Palestinian state, because there is nothing to recognise and no one to recognise.’
Trump’s administration is openly complicit, vetoing every attempt at the UN to condemn Israel or sanction it for its flagrant breaches of international law and the UN Charter. Meanwhile, the European imperialist states continue to do business with Trump and with Israel.
Their mealy-mouthed denunciations and symbolic gestures are nothing more than an attempt to provide cover for themselves, so that they have something to say when the full extent of their complicity and participation in the Zionist genocide is brought to light in the future war crimes tribunals.
Mass action
There have of course been dozens of mass demonstrations in the UK and other countries condemning Israel, often braving police repression and indecent media smears of antisemitism. But in the coming months the urgency of the final and most murderous phase of the genocide makes it vital to use all means to force a stop to it.
On 31 August dozens of boats from 44 countries set sail from Spain to challenge Israel’s naval blockade and deliver humanitarian aid. Others will leave from Tunisia on 4 September. These actions copy previous attempts like the Freedom Flotilla of 2010 and the Maghreb Steadfastness land convoy to Rafah earlier this year.
Important and courageous as civil disobedience is—like that of Palestine Action, banned by a Labour government as ‘terrorists’ —only mass direct action going beyond simple protest can shift the active support still being given by governments to Israel.
We need to fight to get unions in the docks and airports to embargo ships destined for or coming from Israel, and to get workers in arms factories and aircraft component production linked to the IDF to halt work. We need to besiege parliaments, demanding countries break diplomatic, cultural and trade links with the genocidists. In the Mediterranean and the Arab countries, we need to encourage mass action against all governments that maintain relations with the Zionist settler colonial state.
Our demands must focus immediately on an unconditional end to the IDF’s murderous rampage within Gaza, and their complete and unconditional withdrawal. There should be a release of all hostages, not just the 20 Israelis still in Gaza but the 10,000 Palestinians being horribly mistreated in Israel’s jails.
We must demand the breaking of the siege and the opening of all land crossings and restoration of the ports for a massive influx of aid of all kinds: food, water, medicine, fuel and materials for rebuilding emergency housing, hospitals and schools. Likewise, we must demand an end to the settler ethnic cleansing and murders, their disarmament, and the withdrawal of the IDF from the illegally held West Bank and East Jerusalem.
The USA and EU states that have so long funded Israel, along with the Zionist state, must pay the full cost of rebuilding Gaza and the towns on the West Bank that have been bombed, with their roads and infrastructure wrecked by the IDF.
Workers Power has consistenly argued that as long as Israel exists as a racially privileged ‘Jewish state’, with Palestinians as, at best, second-class citizens living under a new apartheid and millions more condemned to live as refugees, there can be no lasting settlement.
We do not accept, as Zionist propaganda claims, that a secular, democratic and socialist state requires Jewish Israelis to be driven out of Palestine—a slander that is both racist to Palestinians and antisemitic. Equality for all peoples living on the territory of Palestine presupposes the destruction of the apparatus of colonial rule and oppression which constitutes the Zionist state. National self-determination for all the peoples of the region is indissolubly bound up with a socialist revolution that dissolves the colonial-era borders, overthrows the western-backed dictatorships, and establishes a voluntary federation of socialist republics of the Middle East.