Dave Stockton
Stage one of the Gaza ceasefire ended on 1 March. However, Netanyahu’s war cabinet has repeatedly delayed negotiations on stage two, which should have started on 4 February.
The Israeli prime minister has also held back the release of Palestinian detainees, many held without trial, in an attempt to force humiliating concessions from Hamas and its allies. The Zionists hope this provocation will provide a pretext for resuming the genocide.
In fact Israel has continuously violated the terms of stage one, most egregiously with regard to the delivery of mobile housing units and building materials. Some of this material passed through the Egyptian side of the southern border crossing but was then held up on the Israeli side for ‘security checks’. The Gaza Media Office has said that only six bulldozers had been let through, while there are estimated to be over 40 million tonnes of rubble.
When Hamas, in response, suspended the release of Israeli hostages unless Israel delivered the promised aid, Netanyahu threatened to resume bombing. Donald Trump backed him up, promising that ‘hell will break loose’, unless all the hostages were released immediately. Meanwhile Trump’s shocking ‘plan’ to drive all Palestinians out of Gaza and turn it into an obscene holiday resort for the rich and powerful is merely a distraction.
This Theatre of Cruelty obscures the fact that Netanyahu is searching for a reason to delay or abort the ceasefire’s second phase – which requires a total withdrawal of IDF forces, opening the Strip for full-scale reconstruction and allowing the delivery of food and medical aid, while finally opening negotiations to end the war.
This is bitterly opposed by the fascistic parties led by Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, who have threatened to bring down Netanyahu’s Likud-led coalition. It would also likely lead to a political reckoning for Netanyahu’s failure to prevent the 7 October attack, and the IDF’s inability to achieve his declared aim—the total destruction of Hamas. It could potentially also lead to Bibi’s jailing for corruption.
A powerful factor delaying a full-scale return to genocide is that it would delay if not destroy Trump’s larger agenda in the Middle East, for which normalisation of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia is essential. However, only a fool would rely on Trump’s rationality to make the fragile ceasefire stick.
War in the West Bank
Another major development ignored by the world’s media, fixated on Trump’s Gaza Riviera smoke and mirrors, is Israel’s creeping ‘Gazification’ of the Occupied Territories on the West Bank, supposedly to wipe out the Palestinian resistance. The refugee camps of Jenin, Nur Shams and al-Far’a have from 2021 been the centre of Palestinian local resistance fighters, a united front of nationally bitter rival political groups (Fatah, PFLP, and Hamas) based on the courageous youth who have countered IDF incursions, inflicting casualties on the raiders.
In early 2022 the IDF launched Operation Break the Wave against these camps, in July of that year launching airstrikes, first on Jenin, then on other parts of the northern West Bank. Since 7 October the IDF has created hundreds of additional checkpoints across the West Bank and arrested up to 5,000 inhabitants, holding over 3,600 without charge or trial. It escalated home demolitions and distributed firearms to settler militias who have forcibly displaced up to 20 Palestinian rural communities in the West Bank.
Meanwhile, IDF soldiers have kicked families out of their homes, separating men, women and children into different groups and marching them out of their neighbourhoods at gunpoint. UNRWA reports that this has led to the displacement of at least 40,000 Palestinians.
The current offensive, which started on the first day of the Gaza ceasefire and was renamed ‘Operation Iron Wall’, aims to ‘change the security status quo’ in the West Bank by definitively crushing the armed resistance.
On 24 February Defence Minister Israel Katz claimed another ‘40,000 Palestinians have evacuated from the refugee camps of Jenin, Tulkarem, and Nur Shams, which are now empty of residents,’ adding the IDF is preparing ‘for a prolonged presence in the cleared camps for the coming year and to prevent the return of residents’. For the first time in over 20 years Israeli tanks have been deployed in the West Bank.
In reality the plan is to ethnically cleanse enough Palestinians from their homes for full annexation, something Trump has indicated he will soon recognise, just as he did the incorporation of East Jerusalem in his first term. In May 2024, Israel reversed the Israeli Disengagement Law of 2005 and allowed settlers back into evacuated settlements in Jenin and Nablus.
Where next?
Despite the endurance and resistance of the Palestinians, this is far from being a victory that some supporters claim. The military-political strategy of Hamas not only gave the settler state the pretext it was looking for to move from apartheid to genocide. It also revealed Western imperialism’s total support for Zionism, enabling it to crush Hezbollah and silence Iran. In short the ‘Axis of Resistance’ is broken beyond repair.
The Gaza War proved too the complicity of Egypt’s dictator Abdel Fattah al-Sisi and Saudi Arabia’s crown prince Mohammad bin Salman, who never went beyond verbal condemnations. But these betrayals and setbacks only mean we must redouble our efforts to deliver solidarity to the Palestinians.
As long as Israel continues its bloodthirsty rampage, either in Gaza or the West Bank, the solidarity movement needs to take a full range of militant measures to aid Palestine, from mass demonstrations, to picketing arms firms like Elbit, to boycotting and divesting from Israeli trade and cultural exchanges. The Swedish dockers’ blockade of arms supplies (see page 4) must be applauded and replicated.
We must also defend activists and writers, who are being hauled before the courts under bogus charges of antisemitism or terrorism, or being dismissed from their university positions for exposing Israel’s genocide. Last but not least, we must protest any ‘deal’ involving the current or future displacement of Palestinians, placing no trust in any promises that such evictions would be temporary.
We must continue the fight to end the decades-long siege of Gaza, opening up full land, sea and air communications, including full access for journalists to report the scale of the crimes committed there. End the Zionist clearing and settlement of the West Bank and East Jerusalem! Dismantle the checkpoints and the armed settler hilltop fortresses, with the full withdrawal of all IDF forces! Convene free and independent elections by all Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank and the refugee communities beyond—they should decide who governs them, no one else!
We revolutionary communists will continue to argue that the only just solution is a Palestinian state ‘from the river to the sea’. Both Israelis and Palestinians must have equal political, economic, and social rights. This could itself only be fully realised if the workers of both nationalities unite to create a workers state, based on social ownership of the land, factories, and natural resources, and equitable distribution of labour and the necessities of life.
The formation of such a state must form a part of the revolutionary transformation of the region’s states created by colonialism into a federation of socialist states across the Middle East.