When I told my parents I was traveling to Cairo, they immediately assumed that I would somehow find myself on the wrong side of a Hamas rocket the second I stepped off the plane because I am a Jew. This is really less a condemnation of my parents than an example of the craziness among many whipped up by the U.S. war propaganda machine. 

The fact that Cairo is hundreds of miles from the Palestinian border and that Egypt isn’t actively at war with Israel didn’t seem to matter. Reason doesn’t seem to matter when it comes to the cascade of U.S.-pushed lies. Either way, I am thrilled to report that neither myself — from the Baltimore Peoples Power Assembly — nor John Parker — a national organizer for the Socialist Unity Party and the Harriet Tubman Center for Social Justice in Los Angeles and current congressional candidate — were struck by any missile of any kind upon our arrival in Cairo.

I guess I should count myself lucky that I was spared from the supposed great epidemic of Hamas missiles hurtling through the Middle East. 

Piff aside, John and I landed here yesterday in Egypt’s capital city and one of the urban centers of the Arab world. While Cairo is an amazing city, the nature of our trip is not leisure. We came to Cairo to join the Global Conscience Convoy, a massive humanitarian and journalist convoy to Gaza organized by the national Egyptian Journalists’ Union and a coalition of socialist organizations here in Egypt. The goal of the convoy is not only to deliver material aid. On the convoy will be truth-telling war correspondents intent on showing the horrors of Israeli genocide to the world and relieving the severely embattled journalist core inside Gaza. 

At least sixty journalists have been killed since Oct. 7 throughout the Gaza Strip as the IDF continues to target reporters of all stripes intentionally. For that reason, nearly 170 journalists from all over the world converged on Egypt to organize and partake in this humanitarian convoy to the Rafah border crossing. They hope to provide much-needed supplies and coverage of Israel’s atrocities against the Palestinian people. The world deserves to know the truth. 

The Convoy was initially supposed to launch on Nov. 24. However, the Egyptian government held up security clearances with the hope of sabotaging such a show of strength and solidarity by unions and socialist organizations here in Egypt. Since the announcement that the Convoy would be postponed, organizers on the ground and around the globe have ramped up the pressure on Prime Minister El Sisi’s military junta to allow the nearly 60,000 pounds of material aid through to the Rafah border crossing. The general message has been: how dare one of the largest governments in the Arab world deny material and political relief to the Palestinian people as Gaza burns? 

As it almost always does, the pressure is working. Turns out, when we fight, we win. There isn’t confirmation yet, but the hard-working organizers in the Egyptian Journalists’ Union and the local Popular Committee in Solidarity with the Palestinian People have expressed cautious hope that the convoy could go forward in the coming days or weeks due to the increasing pressure and the recently announced 4-day truce between occupation forces and the Palestinian resistance. 

If the convoy is able to leave soon, you can bet that John and I will be on it. In the meantime, solidarity demonstrations are planned over the next several days in Cairo. We will also meet with the protest organizers and the Convoy itself. We hope to not only contribute to the struggle in Egypt any way we can during our brief stay but also to bring back this message of truth: Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people is not only very real, but it is worsening and must be stopped. 

We hope to provide regular updates on Struggle-La Lucha as the trip progresses. Palestinian solidarity will never die! Down with Israel! Long live Palestine!

Please follow @globalconscienceconvoy on Instagram for further updates and calls to action. 

An appeal from the Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions (PGFTU) for solidarity 

On Oct. 16, the Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions  (PGFTU) issued an urgent call for international trade unions to take action against governments, like the U.S., that are arming Israel with weapons for the impending carnage of 2.3 million people in Gaza and the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. 

The statement by the Palestinian trade unions called on all workers:

• To refuse to build weapons destined for Israel.
• To refuse to transport weapons to Israel.
• To pass motions in their trade union to this effect.
• To take action against companies who have contracts with your institution.
• Pressure governments to stop military trade with Israel and, as in the case of the U.S., funding it.

PGFTU urged: “The genocidal situation can only be prevented by a mass increase of global solidarity with the people of Palestine to restrain the Israeli war machine. We take inspiration from previous mobilizations by trade unions … where global solidarity limited the extent of colonial brutality.”

Around the world, unions have been responding in solidarity with the people of Gaza and the West Bank, most often in opposition to the policies of their own governments.

Unions leading the labor movement in the U.S. advocating a ceasefire are the APU postal workers, the UAW auto workers Regions 6 and 9A, and the National Writers Union. A Starbucks Workers United leaflet read: “We Stand with Palestine.”  

Other key unions are the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW); Electrical Workers (UE); and UFCW Locals 3000 and 520, which have initiated a labor call for a ceasefire. They are being joined by a growing list of labor organizations across the country, including SEIU-United Service Workers West (USWW.) The Western Mass Area Labor Federation AFL-CIO (WMALF) voted unanimously at its delegate body on Nov. 13 to call for a ceasefire in Gaza.

Teachers’ unions, like those in Chicago, Massachusetts, Minneapolis, and San Antonio, have made passionate appeals for cessation of Israel’s violent assault on children and families in Gaza. The Student Workers of Columbia have been organizing support for a “free Palestine.” 

On Oct. 20, a march co-sponsored by the Movement of Rank-and-File Educators (MORE), a caucus in the NY UFT, shut down Third Avenue, a major artery in New York City.

‘Action at the point of production’

Ports are vital in the supply chain for arms and weapons to Israel. ‍Coordination between communities and their local longshore unions is essential in operations carried out to block military shipping. It is generally understood that union members are not permitted to cross community picket lines. Organized workers know that an action at the “point of production” is the most successful.

On Nov. 3-4, in the Port of Oakland, California, and the Port of Tacoma, Washington, the U.S. military vessel MV Cape Orlando was delayed by protests after merchant marine workers told the Arab Resource and Organizing Center (AROC) about the ship’s departure. It is a part of the U.S. fleet that is replenishing military stockpiles in Israel with tanks, armored personnel carriers, and mobile rocket launchers, as well as troop trucks, cargo trucks, and Humvees.

On Nov. 17, the San Francisco longshore union ILWU Local 10 unanimously passed a solidarity resolution: “A message to the PGFTU expressing our solidarity and determination to take action in their defense consistent with our actions in the past and the ILWU’s principled position of defending Palestinian rights. The UN calls Gaza an ‘open air prison’ of 2.2 million Palestinians. … It is no surprise that there would inevitably be a rebellion.”

“We additionally call on trade unions both nationally and internationally to support PGFTU, a ceasefire and an end to Israeli apartheid oppression,” the resolution says. A Local 10 official will read the resolution to the Oakland and San Francisco city councils, and the union will encourage the ILWU international and district councils to pass similar resolutions.

Trent Willis, a current member and former president of Local 10, said: “Our members are very concerned with the news we’re hearing about innocent civilians being killed in the Gaza Strip right now. And it’s not only our membership, but there are protests going on all around this country for a ceasefire.”

In San Francisco, on Nov. 17, the Inland Boatmen’s Union (IBU) issued another resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire and the delivery of life-saving aid to meet the needs of millions of people in Gaza.  

ZIM shipping

‍ZIM is the main commercial corporation shipping military supplies to Israel. It is one of the top ten largest shipping lines in the world. Workers in Palestine see ZIM as a strategic target, particularly in ports with direct routes to Israel.

Many military components enter and exit the U.S. via its East Coast ports – primarily New York/Newark, Savannah, Charleston, and the Port of Virginia. This is because military supply chains operate with components produced in Europe and assembled in the U.S. Also, these ports are typically unionized by the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA), which has not actively blocked ZIM ships. 

On Nov. 17 in Norfolk, Virgina, a demonstration at the ZIM headquarters organized by the  Southern Workers Assembly was highly successful, reportedly with a great turnout. With the demonstration beginning at 3 p.m., ZIM shut down and sent everyone home at 2 p.m. 

The Port of New Orleans in Louisiana has economic ties with the Port of Ashdod in Tel Aviv, Israel. On Nov. 3, protesters gathered outside the annual State of the Port event at the Sheraton Hotel. Activists demanded that the Port administrators, along with local government officials, cut all ties with the Zionist apartheid state. Following Nov. 3, the activists launched an organization, New Orleans Stop Helping Israel’s Ports (NOSHIP), which led a Nov. 16 march on the Port administration. 

Around the world

The international union movement has been responding in solidarity actions.

Belgian trade unions were among the first to take action. In a joint press release, the Belgian transport workers’ unions called on their members to refuse to load or unload arms shipments being shipped or flown to Israel. The Italian, Spanish, and French longshore unions were on board, along with the Belgian dockworkers.

Workers at the Port of Barcelona are refusing to load military equipment designated for Israel.

In the Port of Melbourne, Australia, Trade Unionists for Palestine are also blocking ZIM. The red, gold, and black flags of the Indigenous peoples of Australia are seen on the picket line. On Nov. 14, more than 50,000 people protested at the parliament in Sidney.

The Liverpool dock workers held a meeting with the community to talk about the war in Gaza and the West Bank. They passed a resolution defending the Palestinians and called for the end of the shipment of war materiel from Liverpool. They are reaching out to other ports in Britain. Thousands of people have marched in Liverpool and Manchester, calling for an end to Israel’s attacks in Gaza.

United Tech & Allied Workers of Britain (UTAW-CWU) answered the appeal from the Palestinian (PGFTU) for union solidarity by calling for the “international labor movement to end all complicity and take concrete action against arms supplies to Israel.”

In Kent, England, more than 400 activists disrupted operations at a factory belonging to BAE Systems, a key weapons supplier to Israel. The largest weapons firm in Britain, BAE manufactures “active interceptor systems” for Israel’s F-35 stealth combat aircraft. 

United under the banner “Workers for a Free Palestine,” British health workers, teachers, hospitality workers, academics, artists, and more — members of unions such as Unite, Unison, GMB, the NEU, the BMA, the UCU, Bectu and the BFAWU — halted BAE operations and called for an immediate end to Israel’s bombardment of Gaza. They set up a picket line to prevent deliveries to the site.

The Japanese union, Dora Chiba (the National Railway Motive Power Union), supports the PGFTU call for solidarity. The union says, “We wholeheartedly support the fierce struggle of the Palestinian people.” They pledged to fight their government’s imperialist policies: the cause of oppression of the people and war. The Japanese government is one of those sending weapons and financial aid to Israel.

Similar actions are occurring all over the world. In Brazil, CUT, the largest trade union federation representing more than 7.4 million workers, passed a resolution pledging unwavering support for the Palestinians. The Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) adopted a resolution calling for the government to “end its sale of arms to Israel.” In Colombia, the miners’ union wants a suspension of the supply of all minerals and fuels to Israel. The Central Trade Union Council of India (AICCTU), representing more than 600,000 workers, is calling to unions for a  boycott of arms shipments to Israel. In Poland, the largest confederation of trade unions (OPZZ) is calling for an end to military cooperation with Israel.

Answering the U.S./Israeli lies

The world is horrified at Palestinians being massacred in Gaza by Israel using U.S. bombs and shells. Entire families have been exterminated, with 5,000 children murdered. Another 80 Palestinians were killed on Nov. 18 when Israel bombed Gaza’s Jabalia refugee camp. 

These war crimes included Israeli tanks attacking Al-Shifa Hospital, Gaza’s largest medical facility. Israeli soldiers fired upon doctors.

The World Health Organization described the carnage as a “death zone.” Thirty-two babies remained there in extremely critical condition.

The total death toll in Gaza by Nov. 17 is over 12,000. Meanwhile, Israeli settlers and soldiers are on a shooting spree on the West Bank, with at least 205 Palestinians killed there. 

Within the United States — the center of world capitalism and political reaction — a movement in defense of Palestine has swept the country. Three hundred thousand people demonstrated in Washington, D.C., on Nov. 4 while multiple protests are happening daily, often in smaller communities. Many Jewish people have joined these anti-racist actions.

President Biden and both the Democratic and Republican parties continue to oppose a ceasefire. They insist that the killing of Palestinians continue.

The response of the capitalist media and politicians to the growing anti-war movement is always the same. They demandingly ask:

What about Hamas? What about the Oct. 7 attacks and killings of Israeli “civilians”? What about the hostages?

All these questions are misdirections meant to justify the bloody war on Gaza. Here are the facts.

Resistance is justified

1.) Oppressed people have a right to fight for their freedom. They pick their own leaders and organizations. The Islamic Resistance Movement, also known as Hamas, is the elected government of Gaza.

The attacks on Hamas as being “Islamist” are bigotry. Two billion human beings are Muslims. The attacks on Hamas are similar to the attacks on Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam.

2.) For 75 years, the Palestinian people have been driven from their homeland. The majority of Gaza’s population are refugees or descendants of refugees from the rest of Palestine.

The Great March of Return

3.) The corporate media has been silent about the 2018-19 Great March of Return. Thousands of unarmed Palestinians marched up to the fences that surround Gaza and prevent them from returning to their homes.

The protesters were also demanding an end to the Israeli economic blockade of Gaza that began in 2005. Israeli snipers responded to these protests by killing 266 Palestinians.

Forty-six of those killed were children. Another 8,000 were wounded with live ammunition, part of the over 36,000 who were injured. A single Israeli soldier was given a one-month prison sentence for the “unauthorized shooting” of a 14-year-old boy who was killed.

The Oct. 7 offensive

4.) The Al-Aqsa Flood offensive that began Oct. 7 consisted of not only Hamas but also other Palestinian resistance organizations. Among them is the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, whose founder, Dr. George Habash, was a revolutionary socialist.

This fightback was named after the famous Al-Aqsa mosque in Al-Quds (Jerusalem), which has been under attack by Zionist settlers and police.

5.) Despite unlimited backing from the Pentagon, the Zionist State could barely cope with the Al-Aqsa offensive. Their billion-dollar system of ghetto walls, automated machine guns, and sensors was overwhelmed by the Palestinian freedom fighters.

The Al-Aqsa Flood is reminiscent of the 1968 Tet offensive by Vietnamese liberation forces. It completely surprised the oppressors, both in Israel and at the Pentagon.

Some of the Palestinian freedom fighters used hang gliders to leap over the apartheid barriers. As Dr. Huey P. Newton — the founder of the Black Panther Party — said, “The power of the people is greater than the man’s technology.”

Biden and Netanyahu lie

6.) Both U.S. President Joe Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu shamelessly lie about the Al-Aqsa Flood offensive. Biden even claimed he saw pictures of Israeli children who had been beheaded, a whopper that the White House had to retract.Netanyahu tried to use a picture of a burnt Israeli baby, which was actually created by artificial intelligence (AI). The latest Zionist falsehood is that an elevator shaft at Al-Shifa hospital is a secret “Hamas tunnel.”

7.) No proof has been offered for the lurid stories of the Palestinian freedom fighters committing rapes. This is the stuff used to mobilize lynch mobs. It aims to justify the mass killing of Palestinian adults, children, and babies.

Political prisoners are also hostages

8.) Two hundred forty prisoners were taken during the Al-Aqsa offensive. The media calls them hostages. They were taken so they could be exchanged for Palestinian political prisoners, which numbered 4,500 as of June. 

Since the beginning of the Al-Aqsa offensive, another 2,000 Palestinians have been detained. They are being jailed under “administrative detention“ without trial or charge. Torture is routine.

9.) Israeli authorities have lowered the number of Israelis killed to 1,200. They admit that 340 were soldiers. Many of the colonial settlers — whom the U.S. media call civilians — were killed by the so-called friendly fire of Zionist troops.

Yasmin Porat, a 44-year-old mother of three, told how Israeli forces fired indiscriminately at both the Palestinian fighters and their Israeli prisoners. “They eliminated everyone, including the hostages,” she told Israeli radio. “There was very, very heavy crossfire” and even tank shelling, she said. 

The Israeli newspaper Haaretz also reported that Israeli tanks and helicopters fired on Israelis. The Palestinian fighters, on the other hand, wanted to take as many prisoners alive as possible to exchange them for jailed Palestinians.

Remember Attica

10.) The Israeli military’s willingness to kill their own to prevent prisoner exchanges is in line with its “Hannibal doctrine,” a slur for the great African general. This directive calls for the use of “maximum force” to prevent any Israeli soldiers or civilians from being captured, even if this results in the death of Israelis.

The “Hannibal doctrine” is no different than what happened at Attica prison in 1971. New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller had his state police open fire on the prisoners even though guards would be killed as well.

Rockefeller did this so he wouldn’t have to come to an agreement with the prisoners who were demanding human rights. The media then spread the story, later debunked, that prisoners had cut the guards’ throats.

Never forget the Nakba

11.) The colonial settler state of Israel was born In 1948 with 800,000 Palestinians forced out of their homes and 531 villages destroyed. Eighty-five percent of Palestinians were displaced.

Fifteen thousand were murdered during what Palestinians call the Nakba, which is Arabic for catastrophe.

Over 100 Palestinians were killed in Deir Yassin by Zionist terror gangs on April 9, 1948.

Malcolm X and Che visited the Gaza ghetto

12.) Malcolm X said, “The Zionist argument to justify Israel’s present occupation of Arab Palestine has no intelligent or legal basis in history.” Malcolm X went to Gaza in 1964 and saw the wretched conditions there.

Gaza is today the world’s biggest prison, with 2.3 million inhabitants. 

Che Guevara visited Gaza on a solidarity mission in 1959. 

Apartheid Israel

13.) The Zionist state is an apartheid regime. An apartheid wall separates Palestinians living in the Bantustans on the West Bank from their sisters and brothers within the pre-1967 borders of Israel.

Israel even has a system of segregated highways. Israelis and Palestinians have different color license plates, which determine what roads Arabs can travel on.

It’s for these reasons that Nelson Mandela, in a 1997 speech, declared, “We know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.” Just as Palestinians are labeled “terrorists,” Nelson Mandela was on the U.S. government’s terrorist watch list until 2008.

A racist sewer

14.) Israel continues to be a racist cesspool. Former Israeli Minister of Heritage Amichay Eliyahu called for dropping an atomic bomb on Gaza. The thousands of bombs dropped on Gaza have twice the explosive power of the atomic bomb that incinerated Hiroshima.

“We are fighting animals,” declared Zionist Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, referring to the people of Gaza. The Israeli daily newspaper Hayom stated the time had come to “send Gaza back into the Stone Age.” 

15.) None of these crimes would be possible without the Pentagon’s support and $260 billion in U.S. aid. This isn’t charity. Israel is ready to intervene to preserve Big Oil’s rule in Western Asia.

For Wall Street as well as older colonial powers like Britain and France — whose immense wealth began with the African Holocaust — Israel represents the open colonial rule that they want to restore.

Solidarity Forever includes Palestine

16.) The wave of solidarity worldwide with Palestine is becoming a material force. While it took years to build an anti-war movement to stop the Vietnam War, support for Palestine has already reached millions.

Palestine is also a working-class issue. Mark Diamondstein, the 200,000-strong American Postal Workers Union president, knows that.

At a recent AFL-CIO executive council meeting, Diamondstein, who is Jewish, urged the council to demand a ceasefire. All of labor should support the APWU president.

Solidarity Forever means solidarity with Gaza. From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!

According to a Nov. 14 Bloomberg report, the U.S. has been “quietly” pouring in weapons and ammunition from U.S. and NATO stockpiles for the invasion of Gaza. These are arms that are not part of the official Congress-approved military aid to the apartheid state of Israel. Quietly is Bloomberg’s weasel word for secret. 

Bloomberg reported that the Pentagon has “quietly increased military assistance” to the Israeli apartheid forces, fulfilling requests for additional laser-guided missiles for its Apache gunship fleet, 155mm shells, night-vision devices, bunker-buster munitions, and new army vehicles. Bloomberg quoted an internal Defense Department list.

The military armaments go beyond the widely known provision of Iron Dome interceptors and Boeing smart bombs. As of late October, deliveries included all 36,000 rounds of 30mm cannon ammunition, 1,800 of the requested M141 bunker-buster munitions, and a minimum of 3,500 night-vision devices. The ammunition for AH-64 Apache helicopter gunships includes about 2,000 Hellfire Laser Guided missiles made by Lockheed Martin.

There can be no question that the U.S. is fully behind the apartheid regime’s “ethnic cleansing” of the Gaza Strip, an operation that began after President Joe Biden’s theatrical public embrace of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Tel Aviv. It was the hug that launched an invasion.

Zionist-occupied Palestine — “Israel” — is an apartheid settler state, more like a U.S. colony. Joe Biden recently repeated a line he famously said in 1986: “If there were not an Israel, we’d have to invent one.” Actually, they did invent one.

Although the British declared the creation of the settler colony in the 1917 Balfour Declaration, it was after World War II, with British power fading, that the Zionist state of Israel was founded (invented) with the backing of the United States. It couldn’t and wouldn’t have been done without U.S. backing. From that beginning, Israel could not have existed for even one day without U.S. financial and military support.

The United States has officially given Israel more than $260 billion in combined military and economic aid since World War II, plus about $10 billion more in contributions for missile defense systems like the Iron Dome, according to a U.S. News report. No other country in the world has received such military and economic support from the U.S. Some have even called it the 51st state of the U.S.

In a speech in December 1981, Gen. Alexander Haig, Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of State, said Israel is “the largest American aircraft carrier in the world that cannot be sunk, does not carry even one American soldier, and is located in a critical region for American national security” (source: NYT article, Dec. 15, 1981).

The profits of this “American aircraft carrier” go to Big Oil and the military-industrial weapons manufacturers.

Taking over Europe’s gas market

Since the 1990s, Washington and Wall Street have been trying to take over the natural gas market in Europe from Russia. The Nord Stream pipeline was the primary route for Russian natural gas, and Nord Stream 2 was built to expand capacity. Before the NATO proxy war against Russia began, Victoria Nuland, then undersecretary of state for political affairs, declared that “one way or another Nord Stream 2 will not move forward.” On Sept. 27, 2022, the pipeline was blown up by the U.S. military, as reported by Seymour Hersch.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken called the disruption of the Nord Stream pipelines a “major strategic opportunity for years to come” and highlighted that the “U.S. has become the leading supplier of liquefied natural gas (LNG) to Europe,” which is at a significantly higher price than the Russian natural gas.

LNG, delivered by ships, is the only alternative available right now to Russian natural gas delivered through pipelines. The top two suppliers worldwide of LNG are the U.S. and Qatar. The North Field East Project of Qatar Energy is an ExxonMobil, ENI, Total Energies, ConocoPhillips, and Shell partnership. They are talking of a pipeline across occupied Palestine to the Mediterranean to expedite deliveries to Europe.

The natural gas U.S. oil giant Chevron already plunders natural gas from the stolen waters off Palestine. Chevron operates a major natural gas facility, named Tamar, located 12 miles off the coast in the territorial waters of the Palestinian Territory of Gaza. As the New York Times reported, this has been projected to become a hub for exporting natural gas to Europe through the proposed EastMed pipeline.

Military-industrial profits soar

Never to be underestimated, “Wall Street eyes big profits from war,” was a Guardian headline on Oct. 30.

“Wall Street is hoping for an explosion in profits,” the Guardian reports.

“During third-quarter earnings calls this month, analysts from Morgan Stanley and TD Bank took note of this potential profit-making escalation in conflict and asked unusually blunt questions about the financial benefit of the war …

“Joe Biden has asked Congress for $106bn in military and humanitarian aid for Israel and Ukraine and humanitarian assistance for Gaza. The money could be a boon to the aerospace and weapons sector, which enjoyed a 7-percentage point jump in value …

“Greg Hayes, Raytheon’s chairman and executive director, responded: ‘I think really across the entire Raytheon portfolio, you’re going to see a benefit of this restocking … on top of what we think is going to be an increase in the [Department of Defense] top line [budget].’”

Gary Wilson is the author of War and Lenin in the 21st Century.

On November 17, the Global Conscience Convoy announced that their planned humanitarian aid convoy planned for November 24 had to be postponed due to bureaucratic obstruction by the Egyptian government’s Ministry of Affairs. All progressive and anti-war organizations need to demand that the Egyptian government open the Rafah border crossing and allow the Global Conscience Convoy depart from Cairo.

The Global Conscience Convoy is a call to: 

1. End the War 
2. Open the Rafah Crossing, for all humanitarian aid (food, water, medication, and fuel) to enter Gaza, and for unconditional exit for the critically wounded 
3. Medical, humanitarian relief, and journalist crews enter Gaza
4. Support the Palestinian people in standing against Israel’s expulsion plans. 

To effectuate these goals, the Egyptian Journalists Union planned a convoy of relief workers, activists, and supplies in trucks and buses to the Rafah border crossing to the Gaza strip. Not only is the convoy focused on delivering material aid, but there is something else at stake: The world deserves to know what is really happening in Gaza. The aim of the journalists organizing the convoy is to gain access to the Strip as to report to the world Israel’s atrocities against the Palestinian people. 

This war will only end with intervention from the world’s governments, unions, religious institutions, universities, non-profits, etc. The Convoy’s organizers are asking all like-minded individuals to support the convoy through social media and public statements. So please, post a photo of yourself with a note: Let the #GlobalConscienceConvoy go and #OpenRafahCrossing on twitter and instagram. 

Let’s stand with the Egyptian Journalists’ Union and the people of Palestine! Let the Global Conscience Convoy Go! Open Rafah Crossing NOW!!!!!

Real hate mongers love Zionism

Tens of thousands came to the Mall in Washington, D.C., on Nov. 14 to support the bloody U.S. / Israeli war against Gaza. Over 11,000 Palestinians have been killed so far, including at least 4,609 children. 

The hate rally was called by Zionist organizations led by a small section of U.S. capitalists who are Jewish. Many Jewish people and organizations like Jewish Voice for Peace oppose the racist Israeli regime.

The turnout for the Zionist rally was barely a third of the 300,000 people who came to the Nov. 4 demonstration for Palestine.

Nov. 14 rally organizers invited Mike Johnson, the new speaker of the House of Representatives, to speak. Johnson is a Christian nationalist who opposes women’s rights and hates LGBTQ+ people. 

He repeats the fascist claim that immigrants from Africa, Latin America, and Asia are carrying out a “great replacement” of whites. As the 60th anniversary approaches of the Dallas coup d’état that killed JFK, this bigot would become president if Joe Biden and Kamala Harris got knocked off.

Johnson denounced calls for a ceasefire in the war against Gaza, saying, “The calls for a ceasefire are outrageous.” The pro-Israeli crowd responded by chanting, “no ceasefire.”

Yelling “no ceasefire” is cheering the killing of Palestinian children. It’s approving the bombing of hospitals in Gaza.

The day after the Nov. 14 rally, Israeli forces invaded Al-Shifa Hospital, Gaza’s largest. Incubators were turned off because the electric generators ran out of fuel. Babies were somehow kept alive with aluminum foil.

Al-Nasr Children’s Hospital was also occupied by Israeli soldiers. “We said goodbye to the children, left them on the machines, and left the hospital with guns pointed at us,” said one of the doctors there. “There are more than 150 children in the hospital who were left for their fates, and there is no one else in the hospital.”

President Biden has demanded that another $14.3 billion in arms be given to the apartheid state carrying out these war crimes. That makes Biden a war criminal, too.

Anyone who opposes a ceasefire, like Biden, has blood on their hands. That applies to Senate Majority leader Chuck Schumer, who spoke at the Nov. 14 hate rally. And that means you, Bernie Sanders, who also denounced any ceasefire.

Fascists for Israel

An estimated 100,000 people came to a Nov. 12 rally in Paris to supposedly denounce anti-Jewish racism. It really served to cheer on Israeli atrocities while ignoring the racism directed at Arab, African, and immigrant communities in France.

Among those who came was Marine Le Pen, the leader of the fascist Rassemblement National. Her daddy, Jean-Marie Le Pen, claimed that Hitler’s gas chambers were “merely a detail.”

During Algeria’s war of independence, French colonialism killed a million Algerians, 40,000 of whom were tortured to death by scum that included Jean-Marie Le Pen.

French cops routinely brutalize Arab and African people. Hundreds of Algerians were killed on Oct. 17, 1961, by Paris police, who dumped their bodies in the Seine River.

The same capitalist class that deported 76,000 French Jews to Nazi extermination camps carried out the murder of Algerians.

Any genuine rally against racism in France has to condemn the attacks on Arab and African people, as well as Israel’s atrocities against Palestinians. Gaza ghetto is today’s Warsaw Ghetto.

Another supporter of Israel is Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, who worships Adolf Hitler’s best buddy, Benito Mussolini. The Italian fascist dictator killed a million people in Ethiopia and another million in Libya.

Italian workers, who were Mussolini’s first victims, shot the sawdust Caesar and hanged his naked body upside down in Milano. Meloni’s fascist sympathies didn’t prevent Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from welcoming her to the Zionist state.

While fascists and other bigots support Israeli atrocities, capitalist governments have decreed the slogan, “from the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free!,” to be hate speech. Austrian police banned a pro-Palestinian demonstration because of the chant.

Britain’s Labour Party suspended its parliament member Andy McDonald for using the phrase. 

Prosecutors in Berlin claim it’s incitement to hate. The expression is called a “genocidal call to violence to destroy the state of Israel,” in the Congressional resolution censuring Rashida Tiaib, its only Palestinian member. 

George Washington University suspended Students for Justice in Palestine, which projected the slogan on a campus building. Columbia University suspended both SJP and Jewish Voice for Peace. 

Fear of a Palestinian majority

It’s strange that a slogan that refers to geography should be so controversial. Pre-1948 maps of the region clearly show that Palestine does indeed extend from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.

What should be shocking are the wild, expansive Zionist claims to Arab lands.

The election symbol of the old Herut party displays the Zionist state as occupying not only all of Palestine but Jordan as well. Herut — which was denounced by Albert Einstein as fascist — was a predecessor of Netanyahu’s Likud Party.

One of the pre-1948 Zionist terrorist groups called Lehi demanded a “Hebrew kingdom from Euphrates [in Iraq] to the Nile.” Lehi participated in the April 9, 1948, Deir Yasin massacre in which over 100 Palestinians were murdered.

It’s a big lie that chanting “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!” calls for killing Jewish people. What Zionist supporters are really saying is that Israeli settlers refuse to live under a Palestinian majority government.

This was the same argument used by supporters of the Jim Crow white supremacist regimes in the U.S. South. William F. Buckley Jr. did so in his 1957 National Review editorial, “The South must prevail.”

Buckley, who called whites the “advanced race,” was worried that Black people could outvote whites in many places. The National Review is 100% for Israel today.

The hysteria over the “from the river to the sea” slogan also serves to smother the demand for the right of return of Palestinians to their homes. This seems like simple justice to most people.

The Zionist State was born in 1948 with 800,000 Palestinians being driven out of their homeland during the catastrophe called the Nakba. Fifteen thousand Palestinians were killed.

It was the old apartheid regime in South Africa that wanted the country split up into several mini-states, really Bantustans. All the U.S. schemes for Palestine are the same. The African National Congress fought for one state with a Black majority.

French colonialism occupied Algeria for 132 years before they were kicked out. Palestine will be free, from the river to the sea!

The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) confirmed that the occupation’s assault this morning on the Al-Shifa hospital complex, its brutal bombing, firing, and shelling inside it, targeting thousands of displaced civilians, tampering with patients’ rooms and wards, and terrorizing patients and medical staff, is a fully constituted war crime for which the American administration and the so-called international community, which encouraged the enemy to commit this major crime, are responsible.

The Front considered that the defeated Zionist enemy, by assaulting the Al-Shifa medical complex, is openly seeking to gain a false image of victory from within the confines of a civilian hospital sheltering thousands of citizens, endangering the lives of hundreds of premature babies, leaving patients prey to shelling or death due to inability to treat them, and with the presence of bodies and remains of martyrs that medical staff cannot bury.

The Front affirmed that what is happening now in the Al-Shifa complex is a resounding exposure of the so-called international community and free world, which allows this dark and criminal Zionist entity to invade a civilian medical complex that should be protected under international law.

The Front added that the Zionist entity, whose cowardly forces fled the battle after suffering heavy losses inflicted by our heroic resisters in the neighborhoods and alleys of the sector, found in its assault on a civilian hospital a means of revenge, an expression of its sadism and doctrine of killing, in full view of the world and satellite TV screens.

The Front emphasized that the Western world, with its alignment and complicity in these major crimes, cannot beautify or repair its criminal image, which has been exposed again, warning of a silly dramatic series directed by Zionists and produced and sponsored by America and the West to try to justify this crime or the crimes to be committed within the complex.

The Front concluded its statement by affirming that Palestinian hospitals will remain a witness to the unprecedented crimes of this entity, which have reached a level not practiced by any occupation or colonialism before. However, our people are determined to resist and remain steadfast and firm and will not raise the white flag. Our doctors, patients, and all our people will remain strong, undeterred by these crimes, and will not forgive or forget the complicity of the international community and international medical institutions that turned a blind eye to the targeting of hospitals and the medical system, and the killing of doctors and patients.

Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine
November 15, 2023

Source: Resistance News Network

Thousands of people joined a Queers for Palestine march in New York City on Nov. 12. The crowd was young, militant, and angry about the deluge of Israeli pinkwashing aimed at the LGBTQ+ community in the U.S. 

Speakers representing Palestinian, Muslim, and Jewish communities emphasized that Israel’s genocidal bombing of Gaza demonstrates that queer liberation is impossible without Palestinian national liberation. Activists also called on prominent LGBTQ+ figures and politicians to take a stand in solidarity with Palestine.

From Union Square, the marchers took over 14th Street, heading to the Stonewall Inn – site of the 1969 Stonewall Rebellion – and concluded in Washington Square Park.

On Nov. 9, Mississippians rallied to stop the U.S.-Israeli genocide against the Palestinian people. They demonstrated in the capital city, Jackson, at the intersection of Woodrow Wilson and North State Street.