The Israeli Zinonist garrison state is at it again. Having been constantly harassed by reactionary Muslim fundamentalists in the Hamas movement, who have been engaged in a series of unsupportable, random, small missile strikes against any target their pathetic homemade rocket-bombs can reach, the Israeli military – who never need much provocation to launch a bloody retaliatory raid or even a war against their perceived enemies – have begun a full-scale military incursion, once again, into the Gaza strip. We say: Israel out of Gaza immediately! These Zionist madmen, armed to the teeth with everything from modern tanks to anti-ballistic-missile systems to nuclear bombs – whose top-level military tacticians and field generals have openly expressed their admiration for the brutal military tactics used by the Hitler regime in WWII, and their desire to adopt the Nazis’ military tactics of brutal counter-insurgency warfare – are capable of any war crime imaginable. Israeli workers must oppose the Zionist government of Israel and its military, which daily insults, abuses and murders the Israeli workers’ Arab, Muslim and Palestinian working-class brothers and sisters. As extremely difficult as it is to do, given the oceans of blood that have been spilled by the Israelis on one side, and the pro-capitalist terrorists in the Palestine Liberation Organization and Hamas on the other, the only working-class solution to the endless terrorist attacks and savage retaliation by Israel is the formation of an unshakeable revolutionary socialist alliance of the workers of the region, of all religions and ethnic backgrounds, against the repressive capitalist regimes in the region. For a Workers Federation of the Middle East! There are many groups of courageous workers in Israel, Gaza and among the Muslim and Palestinian working class who are trying to forge just such an unshakeable alliance of the region’s multiethnic and multireligious working class. We salute them and wish them well in yet another time of extreme polarization of the working class engendered by the politically symbiotic struggles between the Hamas terrorists on the one side and the Zionist madmen on the other.
The terrorist attacks launched by Hamas against Israeli citizens must stop immediately! Socialists oppose terrorism as a dead-end political philosophy and method of warfare that indiscriminately targets civilians and governmental installations, driving a wedge between workers who become the victims of the attacks and strengthening the repressive apparatus of the very regime the terrorists intend to overthrow. The only solution to the capitalist system which creates warfare continually and which was responsible for carving out the impossible crazy-quilt of “nation-states” out of European colonial possessions in the region after WWI is workers socialist revolution, which requires the closest co-operation between the working classes of the entire region. Terrorist attacks drive a bloody wedge between the workers in Israel and Gaza, between Palestinian workers and their fellow workers in Israel. Terrorism is – as the long-suffering people of the Middle East can fully attest – a dead end for workers revolutionary struggles. Hamas’ homemade rockets, hundreds of which have been fired from Gaza into Israel over the past several months, are so crude that they can not be controlled in any way: they are fired in the general direction of an Israeli city or town and the idiots firing them don’t care who they hit. This is absolutely unacceptable and unsupportable by anyone who considers themselves to be a Trotskyist or a Marxist. Hamas: Stop the indiscriminate rocket attacks on Israel!
Today (Sunday, November 18), Israel has responded to Hamas’ pathetic but very dangerous home-made rocket attacks by doing what they would so very predictably do in such a case: responding to Hamas’ hand grenades with 500-lb bombs dropped from modern warplanes. Israeli tank battalions have massed along the border with Gaza; 75,000 Israeli reserves have been called up; and a bombing campaign intended to assassinate as many Hamas leaders as possible while terrorizing the Gazan population into submission has begun. “Targeted”, “pinpoint” bombing strikes – themselves just as indiscriminate as to who they kill as Hamas’ big firecrackers – have already killed dozens of people. Today, Israel deliberately attacked office buildings in Gaza housing local, regional and international news organizations (, killing several journalists. The Zionists are obviously preparing another bloodbath of the people of Gaza, like the savage “Operation Cast Lead” in 2008-2009 that killed over 1900 civilians and militants. The Israeli government is trying to avoid the international condemnation of “Cast Lead” by making it impossible for any news to get out from the Gaza side of the conflict.
” ‘We are extracting a heavy price from Hamas and the terror organizations,’ Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Sunday during the opening session of the weekly cabinet meeting. ‘The army is prepared to significantly expand the operation.’
“The sites hit in Gaza early Sunday included buildings used by Britain’s Sky News channel and the Dubai-based pan-Arab broadcaster al-Arabiya, the news organizations reported. At least six journalists were wounded, according to
a health ministry spokesman in Gaza quoted by wire services.
“One of the buildings was used by al-Quds channel, which serves as a mouthpiece for Hamas, the militant group that rules Gaza. The Foreign Press Association in Israel issued a letter expressing concern and noting that a United Nations Security Council resolution says that journalists covering conflict civilians that must be protected.
[…]
“Avital Leibovich, an Israeli military spokeswoman said Sunday that the media buildings struck included key Hamas communication infrastructure.
‘The target was not journalists,’ she told reporters in Jerusalem. ‘The journalists in these buildings were serving as human shields for Hamas’ ” !
[Source: Washington Post, “Israel strikes media buildings, expanding its range of targets” by Ernesto Londoño, Karin Brulliard and Abigail Hauslohner, 18 November, 2012]
This equation of attempting to report events on the ground from both sides of a conflict with support to the military forces you are covering is one of the hallmarks of the Hitlerite Nazi regime, whose playbook the US and Israel have openly cribbed from and even adopted whole chapters out of in the years since WWII. “Total War” is what the US and Israel bring to the table when confronted by even fifth-rate military formations like Al Quaeda’s or Hamas’.
Trying to oppose modern weapons with handmade rockets is as pointless as it is politically untenable and ultimately doomed to failure. The only way to overthrow the Zionist government as well as the brutal governments throughout the region is the method of Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolsheviks in 1917: workers socialist revolution. Failing to do that, the workers of the world can “look forward” to the day when the big capitalist nation-states once again face off over raw materials and the struggle for “lebensraum” in a nuclear WWIII. As we can see today in the Middle East, as well as in Africa, and in the dangerous games of brinksmanship being played between the US, China, North Korea and Japan, WWIII may not be very far ahead of us. The world’s working class must not let this happen!
Workers of the World, Unite!
IWPCHI
Independent Workers Party of Los Angeles 