Palestine
De Oaxaca a Palestina, el mismo dolor nos hermana
Más de 500 años de conquista y colonización han pasado sobre estas tierras sureñas, desde que los gachupines de ayer y hoy iniciaron una guerra de exterminio contra los pueblos originarios. Desde la era de las encomiendas, los tributos, el despojo y el exterminio, en estás tierras sureñas, los colonizadores de ayer y hoy, han encontrado una férrea resistencia. El día de hoy, nos solidarizamos, como magisterio democrático con la lucha del heroico pueblo palestino, que ha resistido desde hace más de 74 años, la guerra de exterminio del Estado nazi de Israel. Mientras esto ocurre, el presidente de México, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, se ha negado públicamente a romper relaciones con un Estado fascista y genocida, a pesar de que la barbarie ha cobrado más de 14 mil vidas.
Towards a New Year’s Revolution: Fighting for Our Lives in 2024
Today, we are living in an historic moment. All over the world, and here in the United States, people are rejecting their government’s support for Israel’s genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. Millions in the Arab world, in the Global South, and in the West have taken to the streets to say No More War/End the Israeli Occupation/Free Palestine. But the leaders are not listening to the majority voices. When 60% of Americans are calling for a ceasefire and only a dismal few representatives have come forward to actually introduce and support legislation calling for a ceasefire, the system is beyond broken. Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is even accusing people who support Palestinians of being agents for Russia, and President Genocide Joe Biden has proudly declared himself a Zionist while sending billions of dollars to Israel to kill more Palestinians. It is time for us, the people, to refuse once and for all, to be the silenced majority.
No Justice in Imperialist Courts
The ICJ, like the International Criminal Court (ICC), was born as a response to the Nazi Holocaust in an attempt to stop it from ever happening again. This doesn’t mean international law is going to come to anyone’s rescue, but Netanyahu’s genocidal hypocrisy becomes especially apparent when one compares him to the late Ben Ferencz.
Ferencz, who was also Jewish, had been the last living Nuremberg Trial prosecutor until his death in April 2023 at the age of 103. Ferencz was among those who led the charge for the ICJ and was responsible for the creation of the ICC too, believing it to be necessary in the fight for global justice. Unfortunately, even in the scores of obituaries after his death, only one mentioned his opposition to the crimes against humanity committed by the USA.
In a 2019 documentary called “Prosecuting Evil,” Ferencz pointed out that he and Vietnam War architect Robert McNamara co-authored an article in the New York Times mid-December 2000 urging that then President Bill Clinton have the United States join the ICC. McNamara knew full well that in the US becoming a signatory, he could be tried for crimes against humanity because of his role in the US anti-communist war in Vietnam. Clinton signed on, but then George W. Bush quickly withdrew in 2001.
Israel is Guilty of Genocide but the Law Won’t Save Us
South Africa’s presentation of a case for genocide against the state of Israel before the International Court of Justice in the Netherlands last week shed a crucial spotlight on the horrific conditions Palestinians continue to endure. Since Israel began its war against Gaza in October, more than 23,000 Palestinians have been killed, more than 50,000 injured, and 1.8 million people have been displaced from their homes. More than 9,000 Palestinian children have been killed. Gaza is on the brink of famine. Disease in Gaza runs rampant.
Rise Up for Palestine
The Israeli military has now killed more than 18,000 Palestinians in Gaza, at least half of them women and children. The mass murder is relentless, with accounts of mass executions now emerging, and other types of barbarism. Over 1.9 million of the 2.2 million people of Gaza have been displaced. These terms of death and displacement surpass the 1947-1948 Nakba, when Zionist militias fighting for the creation of the state of Israel murdered thousands of Palestinians, and sent more than 750,000 permanently out of their historic homeland.
This second Palestinian Nakba, and ongoing genocide, continues to be bankrolled by the United States. Early in November both parties voted to send 14 billion dollars in military aid to Israel. Just days ago, 412 members of both parties voted yes to a right wing Republican resolution which equates antizionism—criticism of racist Israel settler-colonial ideology and state policy—with antisemitism.
The Israeli Genocide of Palestinians: Made in the USA
For decades the fight for liberation of the US working class has been hamstrung by dependence on and support for the Democratic Party within the two-party capitalist system. The belief in the ability to slowly turn bourgeois democracy into democratic socialism is still considered “realistic” by many on the left. Unfortunately, that ignores the reality that working class people have some control over the capitalist political system or the capitalist parties.
Why We Need Theory
Israel’s assault on Palestinians right now is the most extreme offensive Israel has launched in decades. Hundreds of thousands of people are taking to the streets around the world to protest Israel’s siege of Gaza. The widespread demonstrations across the Middle East have threatened instability and have played a role in Biden calling on Israel to slowdown the genocide.
What does “peace” mean in occupied Palestine?
Since the events of October 7, when Operation Al-Aqsa Flood shattered the illusion of Zionist invincibility, the Western media has unleashed a deluge of bile against anyone who speaks out in defense of Palestinian or Arab lives. This has created an environment in which it is possible for Bernie Sanders, a Jewish man and a descendant of Holocaust victims, to be boycotted as an antisemite by the leader of the German (!) Social Democratic Party for having the audacity to condemn Israel and Hamas equally for targeting civilians.
The libels against Sanders and others serve a dual function. They attempt to define the parameters of the pro-Israel position as constituting only those who support the present invasion and indiscriminate killing of Palestinians. At the same time, they label as anti-Israel (or “pro-Hamas” or “antisemitic”) any view that calls for military restraint on the part of the Zionist occupiers.
On the Question of Revolutionary Violence
“The violence which has ruled over the ordering of the colonial world, which has ceaselessly drummed the rhythm for the destruction of native social forms and broken up without reserve the systems of reference of the economy, the customs of dress and external life, that same violence will be claimed and taken over by the native at the moment when, deciding to embody history in his own person, he surges into the forbidden quarters.” – Frantz Fanon, Wretched of the Earth
