The time has come for Zionism to fall. Political support for Palestine is more important than ever.
The fall of Zionist apartheid in occupied Palestine is long overdue. For the past 75 years, the colonial project of Israel has terrorized Palestinian people throughout Gaza, Golan, the West Bank, and the 1948 borders. What began as a British and U.S.-backed colonial project bathed in the blood of Nakba quickly reached its full evolution into Israeli fascist apartheid.
With every passing year, Israeli violence against nearby countries only seems to escalate, whether it be Palestine, Syria, or Iran. From continuous illegal airstrikes on Syrian airports to the ghettoization of the Gaza Strip, Israel’s crimes against humanity in furtherance of the U.S. imperialist agenda have no bounds.
Because yes, ultimately, the crimes of Israel are the crimes of the United States and their allies. Israel is not the master but is instead a loyal dog on a leash firmly held by the U.S. military-industrial complex.
Resistance to this terrible regime is not terrorism. It is freedom fighting. If the methods of Hamas at times seem extreme, it is only because their Zionist enemies are that much more extreme in their everyday persecution of the Palestinian people. These horrors range from the systemic deprivation of basic human necessities in Gaza to the intentional IDF execution of pregnant Palestinian women in the hopes of wiping out a generation of resistance. How long are people supposed to live under that sort of violent, racist oppression?
Unfortunately, the Pentagon and the defense industry will not want to cede their racist satellite without a fight. As such, war criminal Joe Biden ordered a carrier strike force closer to Israel. It is not yet clear whether this move’s purpose is to support the pending Israeli siege of Gaza or as a safety net in case the Israeli occupation forces cannot stem the tide.
It is clear that all those who consider themselves friends of working and oppressed people must raise their voices and take to the streets to support the Palestinian people. The world must come to the aid of Palestine in its fight against occupation the same way it came to the defense of Black South Africans living under apartheid. Ultimately, apartheid fell due to the combined efforts of international protests, the South African working-class movement, and African and Cuban military intervention.
The people of Palestine are now the ones who require and deserve solidarity from the entire planet, people, and governments alike. Unions, churches, community centers, student organizations, and, yes, synagogues all must come together to demand an end to Israeli apartheid and no U.S. military intervention against the Palestinian people!
Personal note
Earlier in this article, I asked how long people are supposed to tolerate brutal, racist apartheid. For an answer, we only have to look as far as the communist Jewish resistance fighters of the Warsaw ghetto in 1943. Facing another round of forced deportations from Warsaw to Nazi death camps, the socialist Jewish Fighting Organization, or “ZOB,” attacked the column of Nazi troops sent to oversee the next shipment of Jews to the notorious Treblinka concentration camp.
The fact that there were only 600 resistance fighters and they only had small arms to fight armored vehicles and heavy weaponry did not deter Mordechai Anielowicz and his comrades. The ZOB was fighting for the very existence of Jewish people, the same way that the Peoples’ Front for the Liberation of Palestine and Hamas are fighting for the very existence of the Palestinian people.
To think that the people playing the role of the Nazis in Palestine are none other than the people whose grandparents and great-grandparents rose against the exact same type of oppression.
I am a Jew whose ancestors were killed and terrorized by tsarist pogroms and, later, by the SS at Auschwitz. For the life of me, I cannot understand how so many of my people have allowed the last 75 years of genocide and war in Palestine to be carried out in their name.
Every Yom Kippur, Jews convene at synagogue to ask forgiveness from a higher power for not just the sins of the individual but for the sins of the community. The structure of these confessions is “we sinned when we did such a thing.” This year, a woman and leader at my congregation read a psalm of sorts that she wrote. I paraphrase, but this was roughly her point:
“We (the Jewish community) sinned when he stood silent as innocents were killed in our name. We sinned when we allowed olive trees to be demolished in the West Bank. We sinned when we looked the other way when Israeli stormtroopers attacked the funeral procession of a reporter. No more.”
No more. Zionist apartheid is a stain on my people and a stain on humanity. Any Jew who considers themselves concerned with our people or the future of all people has the responsibility to say, No More. Israel does not deserve our support, only our condemnation and rage.
It is time for our people to stop being stooges on behalf of the real enemy, the Western war profiteers and capitalist fat cats. That is our enemy. That has always been our enemy. It is time to stand with Palestine.
Lev Koufax is an anti-Zionist Jewish activist.
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