On Oct. 28, as the Israeli occupation forces began their brutal ground offensive into Gaza, Defence Minister Yoav Gallant declared in earnest, “This is a war where there is no choice: either them or us.”

Translated as: We are justified in our genocide of the Palestinian people. 

This sort of false paradigm has been at the core of Zionism ever since its inception in Europe around the turn of the 20th century: Palestine is the true Jewish homeland; only we Israelis have the right to it, and anyone who dares thwart our genocidal aspirations will be deemed an anti-Semite and terrorist. 

As Israel intensifies its genocidal war against Palestine, now is as good a time as ever to examine the true nature of Zionist ideology, its class character, and its benefit to imperialist powers. By understanding Zionism’s origins, we can better challenge the mythology that leads to the sort of fascist lunacy that Gallant and many like him consistently spew. 

According to the Zionist narrative, Palestine is the long-lost homeland of the Jewish people. Under this fallacy, because one community of Jews was predominant in the land called Palestine several thousand years ago, my community now has the right to colonize this land on behalf of the Western powers. Now, if you ask a Zionist, they will tell you that Israeli apartheid isn’t colonial but the only way to guarantee Jewish survival. 

However, revolutionary socialist Jews and anti-Zionists polemicized against this mythology before Israel even existed. In particular, one of these Jewish revolutionaries, Abram Leon, wrote prolifically about the state of the Jewish community in the mid-20th century. As European Jewry faced pogroms, exile, and eventually, the Holocaust, Leon hoped to direct his community toward building socialism as the main method for the defeat of Nazism and the liberation of not just Jews but all oppressed people. 

A Marxist interpretation

At that time, Leon could not write on this topic without addressing a fringe, but growing, petit bourgeois ideology at the time, known as Zionism. After the outbreak of World War II, Leon was forced to flee his homeland of Poland for Belgium, where he helped found the Belgian communist party. While participating in the Belgian underground and on the run from Nazi forces, Leon wrote “The Jewish Question: a Marxist Interpretation.” In this piece, he details the history of the Jewish community, the need for Jewish support of socialism, and the dangers of embracing Zionism. 

To adequately understand the threat Zionism posed to the entire Middle East, as well as the Jewish people, Leon analyzed the origins of the ideology that eventually grew into the fascist state of Israel. 

At the core of Zionist ideology is the assertion that Palestine has always been the ancestral Jewish homeland. Zionist history asserts that return to this homeland has been the sole focus of the Jewish community since the Babylonian expulsion of the vast majority of Jews from Palestine in the 6th century BCE and the destruction of the Second Temple of Jerusalem by the Romans several hundred years later. 

This narrative also pushes the idea that the only way to guarantee Jewish security and safety is not only to return to this supposed homeland but also to establish a secular Jewish state. 

The problem is, this narrative is almost entirely based on a false version of history. In fact, Zionism is a particularly young ideology. While there was always a certain romanticization of the Holy Land within the Jewish community, the idea that the only way to secure a Jewish future was to build a colonizer government in Palestine did not crystallize as a political tendency and school of thought until the late 19th century. 

In 1896, Theodore Herzl wrote his Zionist treatise, “The Jewish State,” where he argued that the only reasonable response to mounting pogroms and anti-Semitism in Europe was a mass migration of Jews to Palestine. Herzl’s crowning fascist work came only two years removed from the anti-Semitism of the Dreyfus Affair, where a French army officer was prosecuted for his Judaism. 

Required backing of European powers

Herzl didn’t stop with Jewish emigration to Palestine. He openly asserted that the key to achieving this dream would be backing from European powers. This sentiment is at the core of the growth of the Zionist movement over time. Herzl was not the only affluent Jew in Europe who was concerned about growing anti-Semitism. 

Across Europe, Jewish tradespeople, business owners, and academics were tired of living under the specter of anti-Semitism. For Jewish businesspeople, Zionist ideology presented an opportunity for rapid investment from the West and their own share of imperialist profits. For this reason, the Zionist ideology grew rapidly among the wealthier portion of the Jewish community between 1896 and 1918, when Abram Leon was born into an affluent zionist Polish Jewish family. 

As Leon grew and delved deeper into socialism and the struggle against all forms of oppression, he grew to reject his parents’ Zionist ideology based on the same history and analysis reviewed above. At this same time, Nazism was also growing in Europe. Fascism and anti-Semitism spread like wildfire, deepening the crisis for the Jewish community and Leon himself. 

However, even with the rise of fascist movements and governments throughout Europe in the 1930s, Zionism still did not become the predominant ideology in the Jewish community until after the horrors of the Holocaust. During the political struggles of the 1930s and World War II, most of the Jewish community lined up with the international left. Jews were labor union leaders, Red Army soldiers, and anti-fascist organizers. 

One such anti-fascist organizer was Abram Leon. In 1940s Nazi-occupied Belgium, Abram was a leader in the Belgian communist party and the militant Belgian resistance. Leon never stopped fighting. This is exactly why, in 1944, Nazi forces raided an anti-fascist meeting and captured Leon. Several months later, he died after prolonged torture while interned at Auschwitz concentration camp. 

It is unknown when Leon wrote “The Jewish Question: a Marxist Interpretation,” but it was presumably while he was on the run in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Even though Leon died before the horror of Israel began, he condemned Zionism as an ideology of the few and the oppressive. He wrote that a Western-backed Jewish state in Palestine “would do nothing to improve the situation of international Jewry.” 

Today, he is more right than ever. 

As Leon did, all Jews must reject the poisonous ideology that has turned us against our Palestinian siblings. Zionism is an ideology meant to benefit the United States and its partners in imperialism. It will never benefit the Jewish people. 

Lev Koufax is an anti-Zionist Jewish activist.

Oct. 28 — Over the past two weekends, large-scale demonstrations have occurred globally to oppose the genocide against the Palestinian people by the U.S.-Israeli war machine. Millions of protesters participated in almost every major city worldwide, with turnout reported to be higher than the previous week. Around 100,000 people marched in London alone.

On the day before, Oct. 27, a large protest was held at Grand Central Station in New York City, organized by the group Jewish Voice for Peace. Thousands of demonstrators closed down one of the city’s largest transportation hubs.

Meanwhile, the Israeli armed forces have invaded Gaza, according to the New York Times. 

CNN reports that U.S. Marine Corps Lt. Gen. James Glynn, who led the battle of Fallujah in Iraq in 2004, “provided his expertise as a lead planner.” 

A report on the battle of Fallujah to the United Nations Human Rights Council says: “It is almost impossible to list all the crimes that the American forces had committed in Fallujah during these two major offensives, but in brief, these include the deliberate destruction of the whole city [heavy U.S. bombardment, including the use of white phosphorus and depleted uranium shells], killing civilians and wounding persons, torture of the civilian populations, prevention of distribution of food and medicine, all can be easily categorized as war crimes, crimes against humanity and grave violations of international humanitarian law. There has been nothing like the attack on Fallujah since the Nazi invasion and occupation of much of the European continent — the shelling and bombing of Warsaw in September 1939, the terror bombing of Rotterdam in May 1940.” 

And now Gaza.

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

Lifelong Palestinian freedom fighter Leila Khaled on the Palestinian liberation struggle, her history in the movement, and the inevitability of resistance.

Over 7,000 Palestinians have been killed in Israel’s bombing of the Gaza strip over the past three weeks. The atrocities and brutal violence carried out by Israel has moved people of the world who have taken to the streets in protest of Israeli crimes and in support of Palestinian resistance in unprecedented levels.

On the sidelines of the III International Dilemmas of Humanity Conference in Johannesburg, South Africa lifelong Palestinian freedom fighter Leila Khaled spoke to media projects about the Palestinian struggle for freedom and about the need for intensified international solidarity with Palestine. She also spoke about her history in the liberation movement and the inevitability of resistance.

Interview conducted collectively by Iolanda Depizzol, Pedro Stropasolas, Phakamile Hlubi-Majola, and Zoe Alexandra.

Transcription and text editing by Bianca Pessoa

Images by Craig Birchfield and Raúl Laffitte

Video editing by Craig Birchfield

Collaborative production between: Peoples Dispatch, Breakthrough News, Brasil de Fato, NUMSA Media, Capire & Pan African Television.

The Palestinian health ministry on Thursday released the names of 7,028 people killed by Israeli air strikes in the Gaza Strip, a day after U.S. President Joe Biden questioned the death toll since the war began on 7 October.

Biden told reporters at the White House that he has “no notion that the Palestinians are telling the truth” about the number of people killed by Israel so far. “I’m sure innocents have been killed, and it’s the price of waging a war,” he added.

In response, the health ministry published a 210-page report, detailing the names, ages, genders, and ID numbers of every person killed in the enclave. The ministry said an English version of the report will be published soon.

Health ministry spokesperson Ashraf al-Qudra said the U.S. administration was “devoid of human standards, morals and basic human rights values” for “shamelessly” questioning the validity of the death toll.

“We decided to go out and announce, with details and names, and in front of the entire world, the truth about the genocidal war committed by the Israeli occupation against our people,” he said.

Between 7 October and 3pm local time on 26 October, 7,028 Palestinians were killed, including 2,913 children, the report stated.

A total of 3,129 females and 3,899 males were killed. The number of unidentified people killed stands at 218, but they are not included in the final death toll.

The report also excludes those buried without being brought to hospital, those for whom hospitals were unable to complete registration procedures, and people missing under the rubble, who number around 1,600, with many of them feared dead.

As such, the ministry said the actual death toll is likely to be much higher than the report stated.

“We confirm that the doors of the Ministry of Health are open for all institutions to have access,” Qudra said in a statement.

Let the world know that behind every number is the story of a person whose name and identity are known. Our people are not nobodies who can be ignored.

Despite Biden questioning the accuracy of the death toll, the HuffPost revealed that the State Department recently cited the Palestinian health ministry in Gaza in nearly 20 “situation reports”.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) said Biden’s remarks were “shocking and dehumanising” and urged him to apologise.

“Countless videos coming out of Gaza every day show mangled bodies of Palestinian women and children—and entire city blocks levelled to the ground,” Nihad Awad, CAIR’s executive director, said.

President Biden should watch some of these videos and ask himself if the crushed children being dragged out of the ruins of their family homes are a fabrication or an acceptable price of war. They are neither.

Many experts consider figures provided by the Palestinian ministry reliable, given its access, sources, and accuracy in past statements.

Omar Shakir, Israel and Palestine director at Human Rights Watch, told the Washington Post earlier this week the ministry’s figures are “generally proven to be reliable”.

“Everyone uses the figures from the Gaza Health Ministry because those are generally proven to be reliable,” he said.

In the times in which we have done our own verification of numbers for particular strikes, I’m not aware of any time in which there’s been some major discrepancy.

The ongoing Israeli war on Gaza erupted on 7 October after Hamas led a Palestinian attack into southern Israel. According to Israeli officials, around 1,400 people were killed in Israel during the assault, the majority of them believed to be civilians.

At least another 220 people have been taken as prisoners in Gaza, including soldiers and civilians. Hamas has released four prisoners so far and said 50 others have been killed in Israeli air strikes.

Israel responded to the Hamas-led assault by waging a relentless bombing campaign on Gaza, and a complete siege of the territory.

The bombardement has killed dozens of journalists, doctors, first responders, writers, artists, and footballers—among others.

It has targeted residential buildings, hospitals, ambulances, schools, universities, media offices, mosques, a church, and banks—among other civilian infrastructure.

Source: Middle East Eye

On Wednesday, October 25, students across dozens of campuses in North America staged walkouts in protest of Israel’s genocidal war against Gaza. The walkout, taking place at university campuses in the United States and Canada, was organized by the Palestinian Youth Movement. Dissenters, and Students for Justice in Palestine. The students demand an end to Israel’s siege on Gaza, an end to US funding of Israel, and that their universities divest from weapons corporations that supply the Israeli occupation.

Campuses participating in the walkout included Brown University, several City College of New York campuses, Florida State University, Howard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, McGill University, Stanford University, and the University of Chicago.

Students at the historically Black Howard University, located in Washington, DC, staged a walkout. As one student stated at the demonstration, “Our message to Joe Biden is that Howard University students, HBCU students, do not support the drastic and violent escalations that are happening now in Gaza. We want Biden to implement an immediate ceasefire, and we want Biden to stop giving unconditional military aid to apartheid Israel every year.”

At the Columbia campus in upper Manhattan, at least 500 students walked out of classes at 1 p.m. in a walkout organized by Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine alongside Jewish Voice for Peace, despite the intimidation tactics of zionists. Earlier in the day, a TV truck paid for by the far-right wing group Accuracy in Media circled the campus, broadcasting the names of students who have stood up against Israel’s siege on Gaza in some capacity with the label “Columbia’s Leading Antisemites.” Accuracy in Media is the same group that circulated a similar truck around Harvard’s campus, also doxxing pro-Palestine students.

Speaking from where students had gathered at the heart of the campus, a Palestinian student organizer with Columbia SJP said, “We’ve been getting death threats. There has been a truck going around with students’ faces and names, and people have been facing doxxing simply for speaking out in support of Palestinian rights. So that’s why I’m fully covered from head to toe.”

Earlier in the month, a self-identified Columbia University officer of administration had said about students protesting in solidarity with Palestine, “I hope every one of these people die.”

“We have yet to hear any concrete action about this, any statements [from Columbia],” said the Palestinian student, who wished to remain anonymous. “No concrete action has been taken to protect students. So until that happens, we have to keep covering ourselves.”

“I was too scared to come to class last week. People have been taking pictures of me,” said the student.

Assistant Columbia Professor Shai Davidai went viral for claims that pro-Palestinian student groups were threatening the safety of Jewish people on campus. After giving a tearful speech at a pro-Israel vigil on campus, Davidai took to X, claiming that “I pleaded with my employer to help me protect the lives of thousands of Jewish students from pro-terror student organizations who openly laud Hamas—an internationally recognized terrorist organization.”

“There are student organizations on my own campus who see my beautiful children as legitimate targets,” he continued.

Brooklyn College students also staged a walkout. “[Israel claims that] bombing hospitals and destroying mosques on the holiest days in Islam, killing little kids and maintaining an open air concentration camp is somehow keeping Jewish people safe,” said a student speaker and self-identifying anti-Zionist Jew at the demonstration, in front of dozens of students.

“British colonialists created the apartheid state to keep Jews as far away from them as possible,” he continued. “American imperialists send billions of bombs per year for the same reason. Do we really think these countries give a sh-t about Jewish people? The United States has never cared about the Jewish people. They sent ships full of Jewish refugees back to Germany during the Holocaust. Netanyahu shakes hands with neo-Nazis like Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell.”

Source: Peoples Dispatch

Several hundred people took to the street on Fordham Road from Congressman Richie Torres office and marched to the U.S. military recruiting station on Grand Concourse on Oct. 24. The response from people on the sidewalks and in cars in New York’s poorest borough was overwhelmingly supportive. There wasn’t a single heckler or hostile remark. Meanwhile, Representative Torres was not in his office. He was away addressing a well-heeled crowd in the wealthy neighborhood of Riverdale. 

Baltimore Hands Off Palestine
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Stop U.S./Israeli War on Palestine
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Nov 4 National March in DC for Palestine

Teach-In & Discussion – PALESTINE!
Plan next steps
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at NomuNomu Arts Collaborative
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Find out the truth about Palestine!  Bring co-workers, students, friends & family to break the media lies.  What are the connections between Baltimore & Palestine?

Help plan our next actions to stand with Palestine.  Join action and outreach committees.

Baltimore Contingent & Transportation to Nov 4 National March in DC for Palestine

November 4th National March on DC for Palestine
Free Palestine!  No more U.S. aid to Israel!
Lift the siege on Gaza now! 2 pm Freedom Plaza

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The New York Times said that the Israeli account of the massacre at Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital in Gaza on October 17 is losing credibility as new visual analyses suggest a different account.

The Israeli army has been citing a video report by Al-Jazeera, suggesting that the video confirmed the Israeli account that a Palestinian Resistance missile is responsible for the killing of nearly 500 Palestinians and wounding of hundreds more.

This, however, does not seem to be the case, according to the NYT.

“The (Al-Jazeera) footage has become a widely cited piece of evidence as Israeli and American officials have made the case that an errant Palestinian rocket malfunctioned in the sky, fell to the ground and caused a deadly explosion at Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City,” the NYT report said.

“But a detailed visual analysis by The New York Times concludes that the video clip – taken from an Al-Jazeera television camera livestreaming on the night of Oct. 17 shows something else,” the report said.

The missile shown in the video, according to the NYT, “is most likely not what caused the explosion at the hospital.”

The footage, according to the report,

“suggests that Israeli bombardment was taking place and that two explosions near the hospital can be seen within two minutes of it being struck.”

On Tuesday, October 17, a massive airstrike hit the Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital in Gaza, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of Palestinian civilians who were taking refuge in the hospital’s courtyard.

Initially, a top aide for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Hananya Naftali, took responsibility for the attack, stating in a tweet:

“Israeli Air Force struck a Hamas terrorist base inside a hospital in Gaza. A multiple number of terrorists are dead. It’s heartbreaking that Hamas is launching rockets from hospitals, Mosques, schools and using civilians as human shields.”

The tweet was quickly deleted, however, and a new Israeli version emerged.

In the following hours, Israel said that the mass killing of Palestinians in Al-Ahli was a result of a misfired rocket launched by the Palestinian group Islamic Jihad.

Since then, multiple investigations have debunked the Israeli army’s claims regarding the massive explosion.

Source: Palestine Chronicle

The Israeli regime was not the victim on October 7. The Hamas offensive bears no resemblance to the September 11 attacks of 2001, and the Palestinian resistance has nothing in common with Daesh or other takfiri terrorists. The only thing that was out of the ordinary for the conflict in Palestine on October 7 was that for once the fight was taken to the Israelis, and instead of it being dead Palestinians, it was dead Israeli soldiers and settlers.

In Western media, the Hamas offensive of October 7 is being depicted as the single worst event in the history of the Palestine-Zionist conflict, an attack comparable to the 9/11 bombings and, hence a justification for the complete annihilation of the Palestinian people as a result. This is because they have been fed the narrative that Hamas fighters, belonging to the movement’s armed wing, the Qassam Brigades, stormed over a “border fence” and launched a devastating attack on Israeli unarmed civilians.

According to Western media, the Hamas attack is where the war started. The attack on Israelis was unique, and therefore, it justified a racist annihilation of the indigenous population of Palestine. Israel, with the full backing of Western media and politicians, has managed to concoct a narrative that mimics the post-9/11 narrative, one that depicts Palestinians are barbaric Muslim extremists that rape white women and behead babies. But, unfortunately for them, despite this working on older portions of the population, the younger generations are not falling for it because they can see through the double standards and racist rhetoric that their parents fell for in the lead-up to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The attack was only unique in one way

Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, as declared by al-Qassam Brigades’ Commander Mohammed Deif, was a retaliatory offensive that Hamas and the some dozen Palestinian political factions had warned was coming if the Zionist regime continued its attacks on worshippers at the Aqsa Mosque. In 2021, Hamas also launched an offensive named the Sword of Jerusalem in response to similar Israeli attacks against Palestinian worshippers during the Holy month of Ramadan. The 11-day war in May of 2021 resulted in the murder of at least 285 Palestinians, while 13 Israelis were also killed. Since then, “Israel” continued, in 2022 and this year, to violently assault worshippers at al-Aqsa Mosque, with extremists inside the Zionist Knesset also discussing proposals to change the status quo at the third holiest site in the Islamic faith.

In August of 2022, “Israel” launched an unprovoked attack on the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) movement inside the Gaza Strip, killing 50 Palestinians – most of whom were civilians – while no Israelis were killed. Then, in May of this year, “Israel” launched another unprovoked attack that targeted PIJ, along with civilians, which resulted in around 35 Palestinians being murdered. In the West Bank, Israeli forces have been invading refugee camps and cities non-stop since the beginning of the year, murdering hundreds of Palestinians. In early July, the Israeli military invaded the Jenin refugee camp, targeting medical workers and journalists and destroying the civilian infrastructure there while killing at least 18 Palestinians before they ran away out of fear after suffering soldier casualties.

To go through the record of massacres committed against the Palestinian people would require a whole book to be written. However, for the sake of time, consider the following examples: In 2008/9, the Israeli attack on Gaza massacred around 1,417 Palestinians. During the 2014 war, there were over 2,300 Palestinians murdered by “Israel’s” offensive. Then, to throw in one of many historical massacres, when “Israel” invaded Lebanon and later occupied the south of it in 1982, the Zionist military’s offensive resulted in roughly 20,000 dead Palestinians and Lebanese. All of these examples noted are worse, statistically, than the offensive of Hamas on October 7, 2023. As for such death in a short period of time, this isn’t even comparable. Take the opening strikes launched on Gaza in 2008, which targeted a police ceremony, killing over 251 non-combatants within seconds.

In 2018, beginning on March 30, the Palestinian people in Gaza launched one of the largest non-violent protest movements in history along the Gaza separation fence, calling for the lifting of the blockade. Israel responded by killing 300 Palestinians over the course of the demonstrations that lasted over a year, targeting men, women, children, the elderly, journalists, medical workers, and people with disabilities. What was the international response to this? To condemn Hamas and claim that “Israel has the right to defend itself”. All of what is being mentioned only scratches the surface of the horror inflicted upon the Palestinian people, not even touching on the ethnic cleansing of 1947-9 and the countless wars of aggression, coupled with the illegal occupation of Palestinian lands since.

To suggest that what happened on October 7 is somehow a “unique evil” is to either say that you value Western/Jewish lives more than Arab lives, or it comes from a place of pure ignorance.

An attack on ‘Israel’

Often, we hear of “Israel’s right to defend itself” and that “Israel’s border was breached”, on October 7. To begin with, under international law, the Zionist regime is an occupying power in the Eastern part of Al-Quds, the Gaza Strip, and the West Bank, meaning that they have an obligation to provide the means for civilians’ human rights to be protected; they have never lived up to the international standards. “Israel,” being an occupying power, also means that under the Fourth Geneva Convention, the people under its occupation have the right to use violence in order to free themselves from the rule of that occupying power. As the occupier, dubbed an Apartheid regime by the world’s top human rights organizations, the Israelis have no right to defend the continuation of their military occupation, none.

Also, there is no border between “Israel” and Gaza, and there are armistice lines where there is a militarized separation barrier, but there is no border. This is an outright lie. Gaza is not a separate country. This territory has been labeled by UN experts as unlivable since 2020, when 97% of the water was already undrinkable for years prior to the beginning of the war when the Zionist entity cut off the water.

Another thing we have to look at critically here is the true nature of the Hamas-led offensive against the Israeli military and settlements surrounding Gaza. Yes, the offensive initially targeted military sites and resulted in the killing of at least 300+ Israeli soldiers, in addition to other kinds of armed Israeli combatants, so when you see the Israeli death toll, this must also be kept in mind. The second issue with the narrative in Western media about the death toll is the immediate assumption of guilt when allegations are made towards the Palestinian armed groups, specifically the Qassam brigades of Hamas.

Often, Western media will cite the need for investigations into allegations of war crimes committed in Gaza, but then it will instantly assume war crimes were committed against unarmed Israelis. There must be one rule for all: if we can’t decide what is going on in Gaza, then we certainly can’t make a judgment on what happened on October 7 to the Israelis, especially since the information from the Israeli side is heavily restricted. There is no consideration of the fact that there were armed clashes between Israeli forces and the Palestinian armed groups inside the settlements, which we have video evidence documenting. These clashes, which we have film showing unarmed Israelis in the middle of, could well have meant that Israeli armed gunmen accidentally shot their own citizens. We also have testimonies of Israelis who were held hostage and testified to having witnessed Israeli forces killing unarmed hostages.

Until there are human rights reports and independent inquiries, we simply cannot know exactly what happened on the Israeli side, especially considering all of the unsubstantiated reports spread about rape and beheaded babies. On top of this, it wasn’t just Hamas fighters that crossed the separation fence. Fighters from various smaller armed groups engaged in the fighting, while even Palestinians who were from no group at all crossed over. So telling who shot who and what unarmed civilians were killed, and under which circumstances, is going to require further investigation, in the cases where we do not have any video evidence. What happened to the Israelis on that day is a more complex picture than when the Zionists fire missiles into civilian neighborhoods.

None of the above is written to justify any killing of unarmed people, but it works to put what happened into perspective. They live in settlements on top of the villages that Zionist militias ethnically cleansed. The descendants of those who were expelled by force are now making up the majority of those Palestinian fighters from Gaza. Gaza’s armed groups are a refugee resistance, many of whom joined the resistance forces following the murder of family members at the hands of the Israeli military. They lost their lands, their family members, their friends, their homes, their livelihoods, and there was not a single hope for anyone to help them, so they decided to take matters into their own hands, to free their people, to create a new life for the following generations. Hamas is a product of Israeli occupation, violence, and Apartheid. They are a national liberation movement. They do not seek to kill disbelievers in their brand of religious dogma in order to force the world to fall under their rule as Daesh terrorists do. They simply want to reclaim their lands. This does not mean you have to agree with their ideology or their violent tactics, but to ignore why they exist, why they have support throughout the Arab and Muslim World, and why they launched this attack is simply choosing to remain ignorant. The same was the case for the ANC in its fight against Apartheid in South Africa, which most of the world now understands today.

The Palestinian people were led by secular-nationalist armed movements, along with secular-Marxist movements, for the majority of the history of the struggle against the Zionist entity. There is no equivalence to be made between what was essentially a modern-day slave revolt from Gaza and a senseless terrorist attack. In all successful revolts against colonial rule, European invaders, settler-colonialism, and slave masters, there have been unarmed people killed as a result of these uprisings. This is what happens when you murder, dispossess, and humiliate an entire people just because of their ethnicity/race. Eventually, the people who are persecuted by violent racist oppressors will rise up and attempt to break their chains. For all those condemning the Gazans for rising up, they first must look at themselves in the mirror and ask what they did when the people were being forced into using violence as the obvious last option available to them. The Israeli regime itself is not the victim. It is the cause of the violence, while unarmed civilians are simply those who are caught in between.

Source:  Al Mayadeen

Oct. 22 — All over Atlanta, anti-racist, anti-imperialist, and anti-Zionist activists took over the streets despite the attempts by the APD and the Georgia State Patrol to surround us and get us off the streets. “Whose streets, our streets?” chants rang out from downtown Atlanta to the Israeli Consulate to Piedmont Park. 

Families, youth, Jews, Palestinians, BLM, and LGBTQ+ united against the Israeli terrorist state. “Netanyahu, you can’t hide; we charge you with genocide.” 

Placards like “Israel bombs hospitals” and “End all aid for Israel’s crimes” clearly expressed the need for unity in the U.S. in support of Palestine. 

The lies that the U.S. and its paid Israeli clients are telling were challenged by many speakers, particularly the one about the number of deaths of settlers allegedly killed by Hamas. “Where are the bodies?” When were the funerals for the 1,200 people killed by Hamas?

Civil rights icon Mukasa Dada, who traveled from Alabama, would have been arrested had it not been for the intervention of the activists who took to the streets and surrounded the cop car chanting, “Let him go, leave him alone.” After a few tense moments, the cop told Brother Mukasa he was free to go. 

The legendary activist, community organizer, and leader in the struggle for rights for African people around the world said, “What can you expect? These cops were trained by the Zionist occupiers in Israel. They wanted to arrest me for demanding that Israel stop bombing hospitals.”

The pressure against the U.S.-Israeli war machine must continue. It’s the one thing we can do here in the imperialist center and around the world to end the occupation and genocide of Palestine. 

Free Free Palestine!