UPDATED, Oct. 9 — For 75 years, the Palestinian people have been driven from their land by the Israeli apartheid state. Millions of Palestinians live in exile, often in refugee camps.
Gaza is the biggest prison on earth, with over 2 million people living on just 16 square miles. That’s twice the population density of Manhattan.
Nearly 1 million of Gaza’s people are children. And 1.7 million are refugees. They or their families were driven from their homes in what is now “Israel” in 1948 by terror, force, and massacre. They can only return to their own land as day laborers, building shorefront hotels and condos for tourists and settlers. And if they’re not back in Gaza by sundown, they go to jail.
Jabalya refugee camp in Gaza is the most densely populated place on earth. Israel is now attacking it with U.S.-made bombs, and missiles dropped from U.S.-made warplanes, which Washington supplies Israel for free. At least 50 people died there on the morning of Oct. 9 when the Israeli air force bombed a crowded market.
Israel is also dropping U.S.-made white phosphorus on Gaza’s civilians. As of Oct. 9, Israel’s bombs and missiles have killed 500 civilians, including 91 children. Apartment buildings, schools, mosques, and hospitals have been destroyed. Entire families have been wiped out. These crimes are being committed with the full support of the Biden administration and Republican and Democratic politicians.
For 16 years under a blockade
For 16 years, Gaza has been under a U.S.-backed Israeli blockade, reinforced by frequent aerial bombing. People cannot leave or enter. Medical supplies and equipment cannot come in. As a result, unemployment is 45%; some 53% of its people live in poverty. Gaza’s water, according to UNICEF, is unfit for human consumption. Raw sewage pours into its sea. People get electricity for about two hours a day.
On Oct. 8, Israeli “defense” minister Yoav Gallant announced “a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel; everything is closed. … We are fighting ‘human animals,’” he said, “and we are acting accordingly.”
Israel was founded with 70 massacres in 1948 during the Nakba, meaning catastrophe in Arabic. Fifteen thousand Palestinians were murdered, and 531 Palestinian villages were destroyed by Zionists.
Thousands of more Palestinians have been killed since then. Just in May 2021, 67 Palestinian children were killed in Gaza by the Israeli military. Israeli forces have murdered over 200 civilians in the occupied West Bank this year. Thirty-six were children.
The U.S.-funded Israeli state is trying to complete the genocide it started in 1948. On the occupied West Bank and Jerusalem, Israeli troops and armed settlers terrorize civilians, attacking towns and villages and driving people from their homes. They routinely invade mosques, including the holy site of Al Aqsa in Jerusalem, and beat and brutalize worshippers.
Yet the corporate media is screaming “terrorism” because Palestinian freedom fighters are fighting back. That’s how southern slave masters and their newspapers demonized Nat Turner when he led a revolt of enslaved Africans. Palestinians are also breaking their chains.
The same capitalist mouthpieces are howling about the prisoners taken by the Palestinian liberation fighters. They have been silent about the 5,250 Palestinians held hostage by Israel, 1,350 of whom are being held without trial. One hundred seventy of these prisoners are children.
Washington funds racist apartheid regime
Racist Israel could not have been able to commit its crimes without the backing of the Big Oil and bankster government of the United States. Washington has shoveled $158 billion into the Zionist regime. In the United States, all those opposed to racism, injustice, and oppression must stand in solidarity with the people of Palestine. We must demand no more arms and money to the Zionist settler regime.
That’s money stolen from U.S. ghettos to keep Palestinians in ghettos.
In a dangerous move, President Biden has ordered ships of the U.S. Navy’s Sixth Fleet to move toward Palestine. This is an attempt to intimidate Palestinians, as well as to threaten Iran and the resistance forces in Lebanon, led by Hezbollah. The last thing we need is another U.S. big business war.
Poor and working people in the United States have no interest in propping up the Israeli apartheid regime that gave the old apartheid regime in South Africa nuclear weapons.
Many years ago it was written, “As ye sow, so ye reap.” For 75 years, the Zionist regime has been terrorizing the Palestinian people. The Israeli rulers and their Pentagon backers shouldn’t be surprised by the eventual reaction.
The only road to peace is for the right of the Palestinians to return to their homeland. Just as the people of Zimbabwe wiped racist “Rhodesia” off the map, so will Palestinians defeat the racist state of Israel.
Here in the United States, all those who oppose racism, injustice, and corporate rule must stand in solidarity with the people of Palestine. We must demand no more U.S. arms and dollars to the racist Israeli settler regime.
From the river to the sea, Palestine must be free!
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