Three months into the fake U.S.-imposed “ceasefire,” both Zionist forces and the elements continue to batter Gaza. The numbers are a dry ledger of atrocity: over 875 ceasefire violations, more than 400 murdered under the cover of a “pause,” and more that 1,000 injuries from airstrikes that deliberately target the lifelines of starving people: aid stations and border crossings.
Having demolished over 70% of Gaza’s homes, schools, and hospitals, the people of Gaza are left completely bare to the elements. Torrential rains, which would challenge any robust infrastructure, create mass suffering for a population living in ruins. Floodwaters churn with the debris of bombed-out apartment blocks and the unclaimed remains of martyrs. Children, already emaciated from an engineered famine backed by the U.S., now die of hypothermia in soaked tents. To call this a “natural disaster” is to repeat the lie of the century. Gaza’s inability to defend itself from the elements is a direct effect of the Zionist occupation of Palestine.
Since winter began, over 30 Palestinians have died from hypothermia, and 24 more from storms and floods that damaged buildings. During this same period, Zionist occupation forces continued to demolish buildings – at least 2,500. Zionist destruction of what little infrastructure is left in Gaza deepens the humanitarian crisis and severely exacerbates the negative impact of weather.
While Gaza drowns, the IDF and Mossad escalate their war against rising dissent within the 1948 borders of “Israel.” Last week, several dozen progressive Jews and Palestinian citizens of the ‘48 took to the streets against the genocide in occupied Jaffa, known as “Tel Aviv.” The event was met with the brutality that has been the hallmark of the Zionist occupation going back to 1947 Nakba.
The demonstration was a combination of musical performance and protest against the “ongoing Holocaust in Palestine.” What began as sporadic attacks from hardline Zionist passersby soon grew into waves of assault from both fascist mobs and the police. A protester told Haaretz that “when the police arrived, they used extreme violence.” Video footage captured an officer choking an anti-Zionist Jewish woman after throwing her to the ground. Other protesters described their friends being “dragged away.”
The violent suppression of this protest exposes the truth — there is no “vibrant democracy” inside the ‘48 borders, only a police state terrified of any anti-war consciousness growing among its citizens.
The Zionist project has always sold itself to world Jewry as the ultimate guarantor of safety from persecution. Yet in Gaza, it has constructed the largest open-air concentration camp since Warsaw, and in “Tel Aviv,” it beats Jews in the streets for standing against genocide. What safety is there in becoming the new SS? What future is there in a state whose every action replicates the horrors our ancestors fled?
Jewish revolutionary forebears in the Warsaw Ghetto — the anti-Zionist socialists and communists of the Jewish Combat Organization — did not fight the Nazis so that their grandchildren could pilot armed drones over a crowded refugee camp. They took up arms as an act of desperate resistance to fascism. That same spirit lives today not in the IOF, but in the Palestinian fighter defending Khan Younis with an outdated rifle, in the Samaritan warrior like the released prisoner Nader Sadaqa, and in the Jewish protester in Tel Aviv refusing to bow to Nazi policies.
Working-class people across the world must continue to demonstrate, march, strike, and raise their voices in solidarity with Gaza. And beyond that, a working-class movement to build socialism in the United States and across the world is the best and only way to permanently end the brutal U.S. imperialist system that makes Zionism possible.
Lev Koufax is an anti-Zionist Jewish activist.
