The whole world has been witnessing the horror of the genocide that the State of Israel has been carrying out against the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip since October 8, 2023. The genocide intensified after Israel unilaterally lifted the ceasefire agreement with Hamas. A few days ago, UNICEF and the World Health Organization confirmed that Gazans are experiencing a famine.
Netanyahu, allied with ultra-nationalist settlers, ordered the military to seize the entire Gaza Strip, even as doing so deepens their country’s own internal crisis. The objective is to completely occupy the territory, while continuing to expel the population to the south, an area already saturated with refugee camps. We reject this new occupation plan, which blatantly showcases the colonialist character of the Zionist state of Israel.
We, revolutionary socialist Jews, members of the Trotskyist Fraction – Fourth International, rise up against this crime against humanity, and together with hundreds of thousands of Jews around the world, we say: “Not in Our Name.” Everything that is happening in Palestine today immediately brings to mind the horrible conditions that many of our great-grandparents, grandparents, or parents suffered in Nazi concentration camps and other events of the Holocaust (known as the Shoah in Hebrew).
Israel has razed cities, schools, hospitals, mosques, and churches (both Orthodox Christian and Catholic). Everything that could serve as a refuge for Gazans was destroyed by bombs, while the army entered the Strip from the north, driving thousands of people fleeing desperately from the devastation. At the same time, the Kerem Shalom, Karni, Erez, and Sufa crossings between Israel and Gaza, which would allow trucks carrying food to enter, remained blocked, as did the Rafah crossing on the border with Egypt.
The brutal result: Israel has killed more than 18,500 children (more than one child every hour, 28 per day, according to UNICEF data) since the genocide began. To date, at least 62,686 Palestinians have been killed and another 157,951 wounded since October 7, 2023. The medical journal The Lancet warned that in the first year alone, the actual death toll could have been 40 percent higher than officially reported.
The blockade imposed by the state of Israel has already caused the deaths by starvation and malnutrition of 303 people, 117 of whom were children. The UN warns that more than half a million people, a quarter of Gaza’s population, face the possibility of starvation. Meanwhile, humanitarian aid remains piled up at the borders, held back by Israel. Malnourished mothers cannot breastfeed their children, and men and women are collapsing in the streets as they wander around looking for something to feed their families.
Experts estimate that between 800 and 900 trucks of food and medicine are needed daily to alleviate this devastation, but Israel is only allowing in about 60 trucks per day. Images of this hellish situation have circulated widely: dozens of Palestinians desperately seeking food, shot dead by Israeli snipers.
The vast majority of Palestinians now struggle to survive in subhuman conditions, in refugee camps in the southern Gaza Strip. Meanwhile, in the West Bank, settlers, with the collaboration of the Israeli army, are burning the homes and vineyards of Palestinian farmers and murdering them. A few weeks ago, Odeh Hadalin, a Palestinian activist and collaborator for the Oscar-winning film No Other Land, was killed.
Almost 3 million Palestinians live under a system of apartheid, similar to the Bantustans that were imposed by white, racist South Africa. The apartheid policies extend within Israel itself, where 2 million Israeli Palestinians are treated as second-class citizens and not permitted the same rights as Israeli Jews.
All this brutality for the native population of Palestine, a veritable ethnic cleansing, would not have been possible without the collaboration of European and U.S. imperialism. In terms of financing, weapons, and political support for Netanyahu, they unreservedly support the existence of this Zionist state, which was erected to control the Arab peoples of the region and has functioned as a transmission belt for imperialism. While colonizing a territory that did not belong to it, Israel served as a base of operations for the U.S. invasions of Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria, and allowed the U.S. and European economies to enormously profit from oil extraction. U.S. and European imperialism are accomplices to this genocide. We also saw how these same imperialist powers lent their support when Israel bombed Iran, and how Trump came to Israel’s aid by attacking Iranian uranium enrichment plants, with the aim of preventing its ally from sinking into a prolonged war it could not sustain.
Imperialist powers are increasing their military budgets, funded by austerity measures imposed on their own populations. They viciously repress and persecute those who show solidarity with the Palestinian cause. Nevertheless, hundreds of thousands of people, especially young people, are mobilizing in many countries around the world against this genocide. Their voices rise up and staunchly denounce this crime against an entire people. Genocide can never be justified, least of all with the false claim of keeping Jews safe.
In reality, the growth of antisemitic incidents in different countries is one of the consequences of the state of Israel’s actions. Antisemitism is a reactionary, right-wing response to this genocide and to the false propaganda that points to Israel as the representative of all Jews in the world. As revolutionary socialists, we firmly oppose antisemitism. We see antisemitism as a poison that divides the working class, and we must unite to free it from all oppression and exploitation.
Let us not deceive ourselves: all this is the product of capitalism, which is dragging humanity and our planet into total decay. That is the only thing it has to offer us.
That is why we say again: “Not in Our Name!” From that horrific period of Nazism, in which Jews, Roma, queer folks, disabled folks, Black people, anarchists, socialists, and revolutionaries were systematically murdered, we keep in mind that the latter were persecuted to send a clear message: those who strongly opposed not only the bourgeoisie, but also the imperialist war that was dragging humanity into barbarism, must be wiped out. We affirm ourselves in the memory of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, and the many Trotskyist Jews, heirs to the Bolshevik revolutionary tradition, who were part of the resistance against Nazism.
We fight against the ideological operation of the colonial state of Israel and its imperialist supporters, who try to pass off the “defense” of Israel as the defense of all Jews. The reality is that most of those who observe the Jewish religion, or maintain its culture, view the systematic elimination of Palestinians with horror. Many anti-Zionist Jewish organizations are rising up against the genocide, and thousands of young Jews are resisting repression in their own countries to continue fighting for Gaza.
Like those Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto, today we stand in solidarity with the oppressed and rise up against the oppressors. In the United States and other countries, we are among the youth who are demanding that their universities sever ties with Israeli companies and institutions; in Germany we are among those who demonstrate despite police brutality; and we are among those in the United Kingdom who also shout “Not in Our Name!”
Across countries, Jewish people are part of the international movement that organized the Global March to Gaza, which was repressed and restricted by the Egyptian dictatorship. Many Jews defend the flotillas, whose aim is to deliver humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip. Previous flotillas’ crew members were kidnapped in international waters, taken to Israel, in many cases tortured, and then deported. The new “Samud” flotilla will attempt to reach the Gaza coast with more than 40 ships. Bruno Gilga, a university worker and activist in the Trotskyist Fraction’s organization in Brazil, the Movimento Revolucionário de Trabalhadores (MRT), serves as the official spokesperson for the Brazilian delegation and coordinator of one of the vessels. We continue to raise the banner of internationalism.
We have also seen dockworkers in Chile, Italy, France, Greece, and Morocco attempt to stop arms shipments to the state of Israel, and Microsoft workers in Washington set up an encampment to denounce the company’s business dealings with the genocidal state. Therein lies the force that we must develop and radicalize: unions and workers’ organizations must reclaim the historical methods of the working class. This is necessary to stop the genocide and bring us together with our Arab siblings, to wage a struggle independent of all governments and all states for the freedom of Palestine, from the river to the sea.
Only this joint, revolutionary struggle, led by workers and oppressed people, can defeat the Zionist state and establish a free, working-class, and socialist Palestine, where all the inhabitants of the region live together with the same rights, regardless of their ethnicity or creed, within the framework of a socialist federation of the Middle East.
We know that many do not yet share this perspective, but they do share the desire for the terrorist and colonizing state of Israel, supported by imperialism, to stop this genocide. That is why we call on Jews in every country to join this struggle against Zionism, which is responsible for this most abhorrent massacre of the 21st century, and to organize ourselves collectively, with political independence from bourgeois parties and organizations. Let us do so by participating in actions, activities, and mobilizations, and demanding in our workplaces and places of study that unions intervene, shouting once again, loudly and forcefully: “Not in our name!”
This is the only realistic path as we take up the cry that is echoing around the world.
Free Palestine!