Thin the Palestinian population “to a minimum.
I am for compulsory transfer; I do not see anything immoral in it.”
Which of these was said in 1938 by Israel’s first Prime Minister and which was said by the current Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu recently? Well, Netanyahu’s is first, but you can see that the plan has not changed. In fact, as far back as 1895, the founder of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, said: “We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border…discreetly and circumspectly.” An Israeli intelligence document on 10/13 stated: “The evacuation of the civilian population from Gaza to Sinai…will yield positive, long-term strategic outcomes for Israel, and is an executable option. It requires determination from the political echelon in the face of international pressure, with an emphasis on harnessing the support of the United States.” And the support of the U.S. they certainly have, to the tune of $14.3 billion extra dollars.

When the Israeli state was founded in 1948, with the support of Britain, it was to gain a pro-Western ally to control the newly important oil in the Middle East. The first Israeli government already had a plan to dispose of the nearly one million Arabs then living there – Plan D: expel them all. They succeeded in forcefully removing 5 out of 7 Palestinians and destroying 530 villages on 55 percent of the land Israel controlled. In 1967 Israel fought a war to conquer the rest of Palestine, which they have illegally militarily occupied since – the West Bank and Gaza. The U.S. is now the main funder of Israel for the same reasons that Britain first supported it – a base to protect oil and to protect U.U. interests against Iran, Russia, and China.

It is abundantly clear that Israel is now carrying out ethnic cleansing in Gaza, forcefully homogenizing an ethnically mixed population. Genocide is the deliberate killing of people from an ethnic group to destroy them. Over 18,000 Gazans have been killed to date, plus countless others buried under rubble, and countless thousands wounded. 85 percent of the 2.2 million inhabitants have been forced from their homes, and much of the surviving population is on the brink of death from starvation and dehydration according to aid agencies. Attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank are also increasing, with many killings by Israeli settlers as soldiers look on and the seizure of land and homes continues.

The justification for the current slaughter is the Hamas incursion into Israel on October 7, in which 1200 Israelis were killed. And there is no justification for this murder of civilians. However, it has recently been revealed that Israeli intelligence knew about Hamas’ plan a year in advance but claims that the leading politicians were never told. This seems highly unlikely, less likely than that they welcomed an excuse to enact their genocidal plan. In truth, Israel helped found Hamas in 1987 to counter secular nationalism, and the NY Times documents (12/10) that Israel has been giving millions to Hamas for years to keep two Palestinian leadership groups afloat – the other being Fatah in the West Bank – to prevent Palestinian unity.

The majority of Israelis and many Zionist Jews around the world have been won to applauding this massacre because they are raised on a diet of lies: that all Arabs inherently hate Jews and wish to kill them, that the Arabs left in 1948 voluntarily purely because they hate Jews, that there is no way to prevent another mass slaughter of Jews such as the Holocaust without having a fortress state. Zionists even think that Israel is a democracy despite giving rights only to Jews. Most Israelis also have little conception of what life is like in the Occupied Territories – that it is an ordinary civil society beset with brutalization by soldiers, massive imprisonment without charge, and severe restrictions on work, housing, travel, and health care. Nonetheless, most Palestinians are anti-Zionist, not anti-Semitic, and welcome Jewish allies.

This Zionist nationalist hatred serves the Israeli ruling class well, for Israel is a capitalist state with a very small ruling elite and a shortage of adequate services for much of the population. But workers in Israel vent their anger on Palestinians, not the ruling class. Nationalism in Palestine, which although occupied is also a capitalist society, has also prevented the growth of a working class movement even though most Palestinians do not like Fatah or Hamas. The only hope for Palestinian or Jewish workers is to band together, indeed with other workers of the world, in a fight for an anti-racist, anti-nationalist communist society. Thousands are now protesting around the world as this pitiless genocide unfolds on our TV screens, but all of us too must join together in the long-range fight against imperialism and racism and for communism.