May 15 marks a new anniversary of the Nakba, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine perpetrated by the nascent State of Israel in 1948. Seventy-seven years after that original “catastrophe,” a crime prolonged by colonial occupation, the situation of the Palestinian people is desperate. After a brief and fragile ceasefire on March 2, Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has resumed its brutal offensive in Gaza, a veritable genocide broadcast live, and carried out with the military and financial means and diplomatic cover of the Zionist state’s main allies: the United States and the European powers. In 18 months, the Israeli army has murdered more than 52,000 Gazans — including some 18,000 children. The Lancet, a journal that tracks the situation in Gaza, estimates that that figure could actually be at least double.
The genocidal war on the Palestinians has also spread to the West Bank, with tens of thousands of people displaced and under attack by both the Israeli army and armed settler gangs. As can be seen in No Other Land (the Oscar-winning documentary) or in the more recent film, The Settlers, the violent attacks against the Palestinian population, their homes, and lands, which accompany the expansion of settler settlements, have been ongoing since long before October 2023 and are part of a plan, openly discussed by Netanyahu’s cabinet ministers, to annex the territory. But with the latest war in Gaza, those plans have taken a leap forward, with the scandalous collaboration of the Palestinian Authority. According to a report by journalists from The New York Times, the streets of the West Bank — Palestinian territory occupied by Israel — are increasingly resembling Gaza: homes reduced to rubble, walls riddled with bullet holes, and bulldozers everywhere. One of the hardest-hit targets was Jenin, from which 40,000 Palestinians have been displaced — the largest population transfer since 1967, when Israel took control of the territory. This does not include the approximately 9,500 Palestinian prisoners held in harsh conditions by the IDF, many of them subjected to torture.
If the genocide was financed and sponsored by former President Joe Biden (one of the factors explaining the Democratic Party’s defeat), it received a strong boost from the White House when President Donald Trump, flanked by Netanyahu, announced his “proposal” to transform Gaza into a luxury resort once the Israeli army finished the dirty work of displacing the two million Gazans to Egypt or Jordan. Although Trump soon abandoned his real estate project in the face of rejection from the United States’ Arab allies and the bewilderment of military analysts and strategists, his announcement was read by the promoters of Greater Israel as a green light to annex all of Gaza.
Israel’s “Final Solution” for Gaza
The ministers of Netanyahu’s religiously aligned far-right parties speak publicly about implementing a kind of “final solution,” a macabre plan that combines various tools of extermination and methods of “forced transfer” of the Palestinian population for the occupation and recolonization of Gaza. In short, they are expanding the scale of war crimes. It’s not just the bombing, the military occupation, and the destruction that makes life impossible for Palestinians — it’s also the siege, and above all, the famine. Since March 2, when the Zionist state abandoned the ceasefire, Gaza has been completely blockaded, with no access to humanitarian aid, virtually no water, no electricity, no hospitals, and no basic supplies.
The use of hunger as a weapon of war is nothing new, but what is striking is the public vindication of this perverse method of war. Perhaps one of the most brutal so far has been Netanyahu’s Heritage Minister, Amichai Eliyahu, who in an interview stated, more or less, that food and fuel depots in Gaza had to be bombed and the population starved to accept the “emigration plan.” Eliyahu had become famous when he called for dropping a nuclear bomb on Gaza at the beginning of the attack. The ideological architect of the famine plan, now perfected by these engineers of genocide, is former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. Recall that the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Gallant and Netanyahu, accused of precisely this and other war crimes and crimes against humanity.
A Weakened Netanyahu
However, despite military superiority (made possible by the United States, Germany, France, Great Britain, and other powers), genocide, and the most brutal tactics against the Palestinian population, Netanyahu has so far failed to achieve the “total victory” he promised at the start of operations: the “eradication of Hamas” and the recovery of the hostages by military means. Acceptance of the ceasefire, largely imposed by Trump on the eve of his arrival at the White House, was an indirect way of admitting that the objectives were unattainable.
The exchange ceremonies of dozens of Israeli hostages for thousands of Palestinian prisoners, transformed into Hamas political propaganda events, visually demonstrated the failure of Netanyahu’s plan, which, though it weakened Hamas (and its regional allies like Hezbollah and, indirectly, Iran) did not eliminate it as a political-military force. Nor did he achieve the “voluntary migration” of the Palestinian population, who returned en masse to their homes despite the destruction. This posed the dilemma for Netanyahu that if progress was made in the subsequent phases of the ceasefire, Gaza could return to a situation not so different from that before the October 7 attack.
Politically, the ceasefire had jeopardized Netanyahu’s governing coalition, and therefore his personal freedom, given that he is currently on trial for corruption.
The War Loses Its Legitimacy Among Israelis
These same contradictions arising from the failed Israeli strategy explain both the ceasefire and its collapse, as well as the beginning of a new phase of the military offensive in Gaza, which some analysts are already considering a “second war.” On May 5, Netanyahu’s security cabinet voted on a new plan that would be implemented once Trump concludes his Middle East tour in mid-May. If implemented — which is seriously doubtful — it would entail a radical change from the strategy of the first phase of the war in Gaza. The so-called “Gideon’s Chariots” operation (the Zionist state always gives its massacres a biblical dimension) involves the military occupation of Gaza, the displacement of the population to the south, and their “concentration” (sic) in camps, around which Israel would organize the distribution of food rations under the supervision of American “contractors” (mercenaries). To carry out this offensive, the army will have to call up tens of thousands of reservists — between 60,000 and 100,000, according to military sources.
Even on paper, the plan is flawed, starting with the army chief’s own admission that the strategy of annihilation — military “cleansing” and “sterilization zones” — is contradictory to the priority of rescuing the 24 hostages believed to still be alive, out of a total of 59 held by Hamas.
From a military perspective, this would go against the guiding principle of short wars, which is precisely because Israel largely bases its military capacity on reservists — that is, on the population who must leave their jobs, their studies, and their families to serve in the army, which has a direct impact on economic, social, and family life. The signs of “war fatigue” after a year and a half of military operations and massacres are already evident.
In the context of an expansion of the war fronts toward Lebanon and, above all, Syria, where Israel has been intervening under the pretext of protecting the Druze minority, in order to seize a buffer zone protecting the Golan Heights and eventually fragment the territory, the army appears overstretched in its capabilities.
According to a report in +972 magazine, the Israeli army is facing its worst reservist rejection crisis since the 1982 Lebanon War. Although precise figures are unknown and military authorities are cautious about disclosing them, various analysts estimate this rejection could be around 40 to 50 percent on average; conservative estimates suggest that this figure exceeds 100,000 reservists. Added to this is the fact that religious sectors are exempt from compulsory military service, a concession Netanyahu had to make to his religious Zionist partners.
Although the reasons for this reservist crisis are diverse, objectively it is yet another expression of the war’s loss of legitimacy for a significant portion of the Israeli population, who, in sync with the hostages’ families, are demanding an end to the war and the opening of negotiations to recover all the hostages. According to a late March poll, 69 percent of the population favors negotiations for the return of the hostages; this position is the majority (54%) even among voters of the governing coalition. The two main reasons driving this opposition are the priority placed on the hostages’ release and the perception of Netanyahu’s personal political interest in prolonging the war and expanding it to other fronts as a more secure way to guarantee his political survival. In addition to Netanyahu’s unpopularity, he took advantage of the reshuffling of his coalition to advance the long-delayed judicial reform and a purge of intelligence services and military commanders not aligned with his interests — a kind of Israeli version of Donald Trump’s attack on the “deep state” in the United States.
This opposition is manifested in the streets, with demonstrations against Netanyahu and his extremist allies. These demonstrations, with varying degrees of scale, have been taking place practically since the beginning of the Gaza offensive, although — with the exception of some small groups — without questioning the massacre committed against the Palestinian people. But this has begun to change, especially since the collapse of the ceasefire. On Holocaust Remembrance Day, several survivors and hundreds of protesters broke the silence on Gaza and marched with photos of Palestinian children murdered by the Israeli army. This first unequivocal sign of empathy may indicate the beginning of a deeper change.
“America First”
While domestically Netanyahu is treading carefully in order to keep his coalition united, pushing him ever closer to the “final solution,” externally he remains subject to the vagaries of U.S. foreign policy, the main ally and supporter of the State of Israel. There is no doubt that Trump (like the entire Far Right, even its neo-Nazi counterparts) is more ideologically and politically aligned with Netanyahu, and that his arrival in the White House has further emboldened sectors of the Israeli Far Right. But that does not mean that Netanyahu (and, for that matter, Israel) can influence U.S. policy or drag imperialist states into military adventures that are not in their national interest.
Bibi appears to be receiving some practical lessons on the meaning of “America First” as a guiding principle of Trump’s foreign policy.
The U.S. president announced that he was suspending attacks against the Houthis in Yemen because they had agreed to stop attacking commercial vessels in the Red Sea, leaving Israel out of the agreement, which continues to be attacked by the Iranian-allied militia.
For Trump (as for Biden before him), the main geopolitical problem in the Middle East is Iran. This is also true for Netanyahu, who is pushing for a U.S.-backed war against Iran to destroy its nuclear capability. However, the United States is not interested in being drawn into a new war in the Middle East, which would escalate beyond the region and have ominous consequences for the international economy. That is why Trump has initiated negotiations with the Iranian regime through his personal envoy, Steve Witkoff, although his administration is divided. The hawks (the old “neocons”) who support Netanyahu’s hard line against Iran appear to have been momentarily defeated by the faction led by Vice President Vance, whose policy is to exert extreme pressure through economic sanctions and military threats to extract concessions from the weakened Iranian regime that are as favorable as possible to U.S. interests. The removal of Michael Waltz as national security advisor is an example of this internal rebalancing in favor of the “isolationists.” It goes without saying that any viable negotiation means that Iran will retain some uranium enrichment capability, which Netanyahu finds unacceptable.
Trump will begin a tour of the Middle East in the coming days. He will visit Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates (but not Israel), with the geopolitical objective of expanding the collaboration of U.S. allies in regional stability, and with the firm expectation of returning with billions in investments promised by the Saudi monarchy and Abu Dhabi, in addition to oil and defense agreements. To Netanyahu’s dismay, the White House announced that it is no longer demanding that Saudi Arabia normalize relations with Israel as a condition for advancing negotiations for cooperation with the kingdom’s civilian nuclear program.
The continuation of the genocidal war in Gaza, with its images of carnage, destruction, and famine, hampers Trump’s plans to bring Saudi Arabia into the Abraham Accords. The Saudi monarchy knows it cannot reconcile with Israel as long as the Zionist state perpetuates genocide. It maintains its demand for a formal reference to a “Palestinian state” to maintain legitimacy both internally and among the Arab masses at large.
This would explain why Trump has embraced the failed Israeli humanitarian aid plan, rejected by all mainstream NGOs, and is pushing for its acceptance in order to distance the United States from the images of famine in Gaza. In this context, Netanyahu is torn between pressure to launch the extreme version of Operation Gideon’s Chariots to prevent his allies from leaving the government and staying in line with Washington’s interests.
A Reawakening of the Movement for Palestine?
The genocide perfected by famine in Gaza continues to erode the legitimacy of the State of Israel internationally. This widespread repudiation was expressed in the emergence of a massive solidarity movement with the Palestinian people, led primarily by the youth of major universities in central countries. This movement, which denounced not only Netanyahu’s genocide but also their own governments complicity in the massacre, was harshly repressed with expulsions and trials on charges of alleged antisemitism. In the case of the United States, this persecution included the threat of deportation of students, such as Mahmoud Khalil, and a widespread attack on universities, whose authorities capitulated to the government’s threat of funding cuts.. If the solidarity movement with Palestine is compared to the movement against the Vietnam War, the state persecution is reminiscent of McCarthyism, with an unprecedented attack on the right to protest and freedom of expression. Part of this persecution is the trial of Anasse Kazib, a leader of the French organization Revolution Permanente, and the prosecution of Vanina Biasi (a representative of the Workers’ Party in the FIT-U of Argentina).
In the face of the brutality deployed by the Zionist state and the continued collaboration of Western “democratic” governments with Netanyahu’s war crimes, there are signs that this movement is reawakening. The mobilization at Columbia University and the protest by teachers and students at Brooklyn College in early May, as well as the mass mobilizations that are beginning to take place as part of the international commemoration of the Nakba, such as the one in Spain, show that there is still popular outrage over Israel’s genocide. The organizations that have emerged from the leftist ruptures of anti-Zionist young people of Jewish origin and the enormous international solidarity campaign with Anasse Kazib also show that there are more than enough conditions and reasons to establish an international movement against the genocide committed by the State of Israel and its collaborators, against the colonial oppression of the Zionist state, and in defense of the Palestinian people’s right to national self-determination.
Originally Published in Spanish on May 11 in La Izquierda Diario