The truce in Gaza lasted just one week, the time it took to exchange 80 of the Israeli hostages kidnapped by Hamas for 210 of the thousands of Palestinian prisoners held by Israel.
After destroying and occupying the north of the Gaza strip, after killing 15,000 people and driving out 1.7 million, the Israeli army is now moving into the south. Under the pretext of "eliminating Hamas" and "continuing the war until victory", Netanyahu and his far-right ministers seem ready to wipe out Gaza.
They are engaged in a murderous, headlong rush against the Palestinians. In Gaza, Palestinians are being crushed by bombs. In the West Bank, they are prey to the arbitrary rule of Israeli settlers, who drive them off their land, cut off the access roads to their villages, and even slaughter them in cold blood. In East Jerusalem, the army hunts down those who show solidarity with Gaza. Arab neighborhoods are sealed off, businesses closed and homes often destroyed.
The violence and daily humiliations of this colonial occupation are fueling a legitimate revolt. Since October 7, in the absence of other political options, Hamas has emerged as the champion of the Palestinian cause. But it’s the Israeli army that keeps breeding generations of rebels throughout Palestine, who will be ready to fight and die to avoid being confined for life with no hope of escaping their plight.
To justify the massacre in Gaza, Netanyahu, his military staff and their Western allies repeatedly invoke Israel’s security. But Israel's Jewish population will have neither peace nor security as long as it remains complicit in the oppression of the Palestinians. Its young people spend their best years in uniform, and compromise themselves by taking part in colonial oppression. The extreme right and the most extremist settlers are increasing their hold over political life and civil liberties.
From Macron to Biden, the leaders of the great world powers "deplore the end of the truce" and urge Netanyahu to cause "fewer civilian deaths in the south than in the north". How hypocritical! Without the unconditional support of the United States, without the four billion dollars in military aid it provides every year, Israel's leaders would not have the most powerful army in the Middle East. They wouldn’t have been able to drop 40,000 tons of bombs on Gaza in 45 days.
To control this strategic region and its riches, France, Great Britain and later the US pitted one people against the other, drawing arbitrary borders and establishing regimes to their liking – overthrowing those which were not obedient enough. A systematic policy, at the cost of bloody wars.
To divert attention, American leaders are once again talking about a "two-state solution". How cynical to re-hash that formula when Gaza is in ruins and the West Bank devoured by ever-expanding settlements. For 75 years, the US has allowed Israeli governments to make the formation of a Palestinian state impossible, by annexing or colonizing entire regions. Even the Palestinian Authority, created after the Oslo Accords, has been reduced to a police force.
As the death toll mounts, negotiations are underway to decide which repressive apparatus will take charge of the Palestinians. All the protagonists in these negotiations, from Hamas to Israel, from Saudi Arabia to Egypt, from Qatar to Turkey and Iran, have the utmost contempt for the Palestinian population. For them, Gaza is nothing more than an arena to increase their influence in a Middle East that has been transformed into a powder keg by the major world powers.
The Arab states, just like Hamas, are not fighting against the oppressive imperialist order, they merely want to create a place for themselves within it! There can be no way out for the Palestinians as long as the big industrial and financial groups impose their law, the law of profit, around the world.
Here in France, the politicians and the journalists devoted to the bourgeois order use the conflict in Palestine to stir up divisions between workers, as they do after every murder or terrorist attack. They portray all those outraged by the plight of the Palestinians as anti-Semites and make a big deal of a supposed “clash of civilizations”.
It's revolting propaganda that can only fan the flames of hatred. It's a trap we must not fall into because this division is a means of exploiting us today, and of sending us onto the battlefields tomorrow. Regardless of national borders, origins or religions, workers everywhere are subject to the same capitalist system, a system that is plunging us into barbarism and that we must prepare to overthrow.
Nathalie Arthaud