Since Israel launched its aggression against Gaza, 17 days ago, over 900 Palestinians have been slaughtered in cold blood. More than four times that number have been injured. Hospitals are overflowing with dying patients hit by direct fire, shrapnel or cluster bombs, while suffering acute shortages of medicines, food and electricity. Many do not even have clean drinking water.
Under the Israeli army's fire, Gaza is turning into a graveyard, covered in rubble. Most of the population is cornered in the Strip's tiny urban area. Nothing escapes the murderous attacks of the invaders. The 43 children killed in the bombing of a UN school made the headlines in British papers. But that is only one case among others. Residential blocks overflowing with refugees who responded to Israeli instructions have been deliberately bombed as well, claiming dozens of victims each time. The fact is that for the Israeli generals every Palestinian is a "legitimate" target.
Israel's state terrorism will backfire
The Israeli state is systematically destroying any remaining public infrastructure and building, ensuring that if and when its troops finally withdraw, life will be virtually impossible for the 1.6 million inhabitants of the Gaza Strip for years to come, even if the 2-year old blockade is lifted.
Beyond the material damage it is causing, this brutal aggression is blatantly aimed at terrorising the Gaza population. The Israeli government hopes that the despair it is generating will eventually drive a wedge between the Palestinian people and the Hamas leadership they elected in office.
The Israeli leaders are incapable of learning from their own past. Everyone will remember how their army shelled the PLO government of the late Yasser Arafat into irrelevance, under the same cynical pretext of "uprooting terrorism". The only result of this was to push the population into the arms of Hamas, the very same fundamentalist militia that the Israeli secret service had propped up, in the late 1980s, in order to undermine the PLO's credit!
Such is, indeed, the only possible "dividend" of Israel's state terrorism. The Israeli leaders could not bear the thought of recognising the PLO because of the enormous credit it had among the Palestinian people. They did everything to destroy this credit only to pave the way for demagogues who have no qualms whatsoever in using the people they claim to represent as canon-fodder.
Just as Israel's carpet-bombing of the Lebanon only resulted in the propping up of the Hezbollah militias which it aimed to weaken, its terrorist aggression against Gaza is bound either to prop up Hamas itself, or to pave the way for forces which are even more radical in their anti-Jewish demagogy.
Western hypocrisy will backfire too
In these events, the so-called "international community" has once again been exposed, just as it was exposed by its unqualified support of the US-British aggression against Iraq and Afghanistan.
Predictably, Israel's response to the UN's belated resolution calling for a ceasefire, was to bring in tens of thousands of reservists and escalate its operations against the population of Gaza City.
But how could it have been otherwise? The Israeli leaders know all too well that they have nothing to fear from Western powers - regardless of their hypocritical calls for "an end to all violence". They know all too well that Bush's and Brown's official "dismay" in front of the brutal slaughter of Gaza is only aimed at their domestic public opinion and that it will do nothing to change their cynical support for Israel's militarism and oppression of the Palestinians.
The truth is that for the Western capitalist classes and their big multinational companies, the state of Israel is a pillar of their stranglehold on the Middle-East. For over 60 years, the West's massive military aid to Israel has been aimed at turning its army and people into an invincible police force aimed against the populations of the whole region. By now, Israel is an indispensable cog in the rich countries' system of worldwide domination.
But this may backfire too. In the Arab world; hundreds of thousands, possibly millions marched in support of Gaza, often against the will of pro-Western leaders. In the Occupied Territories, daily protests have taken place, including a 3-day general strike in the West Bank. In Israel itself, opposition to the war is raising its head, with many, albeit scarcely reported, protests, brutally repressed by the army. The Israeli population may well begin to show that it has had enough of being used as wardens of the imprisoned Palestinian people. And we, British workers, have every reason to be on the side of the Palestinian people and all those who protest against the crimes which are being committed in Gaza in front of our eyes.