By Dave Stockton
On 18 March at 2.10am Israel restarted bombing the homes of civilians across Gaza, ending the two-month ceasefire.
Its pretext was that Hamas would not agree to an extension of stage one, which would allow Israel Defence Forces to remain in the Strip indefinitely, while all the hostages are released.
As we go to press the new onslaught had resulted in the killing of 634 Palestinians, including entire families and 322 children. At least 50,277 murdered Palestinians can be accounted for. Only when the rubble of buildings collapsed by US-supplied bunker buster bombs is cleared will the true toll be known.
A complete blockade of all food, fuel, medical supplies and the cutting of electricity supplies to water de-salination plants has been in place since the beginning of March. Israel’s silent killing of Palestinians through starvation, disease and mutilation will ensure the genocide will continue for years after the shooting eventually stops.
Meanwhile, Israel’s wider war has also picked up. In Jenin the IDF fired teargas at families gathering at the graves of relatives during Eid, as army and settlers continue their clearing out of the West Bank’s northern villages and cities. In Lebanon, they have violated the ceasefire, bombing Beirut and Shia areas. In Syria, the IDF have occupied the buffer zone beyond the Golan Heights and are now just 20km from Damascus.
Elusive ‘peace’ proposals
The not so hidden hand of Donald Trump’s administration is plain to see in all this. Not only does his silence amount to an endorsement of these crimes against humanity, his envoy Steve Witkoff presented a ‘peace agreement’ negotiated by Trump and Israel to Hamas in early March.
This demanded Hamas and Islamic Jihad fighters completely disarm, release all the Israeli hostages and agree to leave Gaza for exile. But it did not promise self-government for Gaza or the withdrawal of the IDF, let alone a Palestinian state or the return of the millions of external refugees. But it did allow for the unilateral tearing up of the ceasefire and the return of the fascist Itamar ben Gvir to Netanyahu’s war cabinet, which was of course Trump’s real intention.
The Hostages and Missing Families Forum were outraged. Protesters in Tel Aviv, led by families of the remaining 59 hostages, chanted, ‘The price of your war is the life of the hostages!’ For now, however, Netanyahu is feeling emboldened and is content to sit it out.
A new factor is the emergence of anti-Hamas demonstrations within Gaza, reported by CNN to involve ‘10,000’ in total. They are calling on Hamas to end the war and even ‘get out’ of Gaza. Clearly the population is exhausted by the effects of the genocide.
But while socialists share the protesters’ opposition to Hamas’ politics, in the current conditions Israel’s response will not be to end the torment visited on the population but rather to intensify it, just as Trump will be encouraged to press harder for a second Nakba.
Nevertheless Hamas is a mass party with deep roots in the population, so it is vulnerable to street protests. On 29 March it agreed to a new Gaza ceasefire proposal from mediators in Egypt and Qatar.
An Egyptian official described it as meaning that five living hostages would be released, in return for Israel allowing aid into the territory and a week-long pause in fighting. Israel would release hundreds of Palestinian prisoners. Predictably Israel submitted a counterproposal in full coordination with the United States.
The construction of settlements, land grabs and evictions in the West Bank would continue, as they have since before 7 October. Only the most malicious caricature of a two-state solution would be ‘negotiated’ and even then not achieved, as was the case with the Oslo Accords.
Lasting and just peace
If the cruel experience of the last 18 months has shown anything, it is that there will never be a just and lasting peace in the entire Middle East as long as the racist state of Israel continues to the oppress the Palestinians and is supported by the US and European imperialists as their gendarme, to protect their exploitation of the economic and strategically invaluable assets in the region.
Peace will only be possible if the self-defined ‘state of the Jewish people’, engaged in driving out the indigenous population, is replaced by a unified, secular, democratic and socialist Palestine in the context of a regional socialist revolution.
For this the Palestinian left and working class, plus all progressive Israelis that reject the Zionist colonisation project, need a strategy, a programme that places no hopes in the despotic regimes of the region: Iran, Saudi Arabia or Qatar.
Rather, the liberation struggle must be placed in the context of a revolution in the entire Middle East, in Arab states such as Syria and Egypt, but also in Iran and Turkey. This requires the fight to build new revolutionary workers’ parties, in Palestine and across the Middle East, and a new International based on a programme of permanent revolution.
The tasks of the huge solidarity movement in the West are not only to expose the Zionists’ crimes but to do all we can to impede the moral and material support they receive from our own rulers. We must fight for the trade unions and all forces that consider themselves socialists and anti-imperialists to end all governmental and big business support for Israel’s war effort.
We must combat the branding of Palestinian resistance to Israeli genocide as terrorism, the smearing of pro-Palestinian activists as antisemites, particularly the growing number of anti-Zionist Jewish people. In Britain we must demand David Lammy and Keir Starmer halt the export of components for the F-16 and F-35 fighter jets, used by Israel to conduct its bombing campaigns. We must step up our demand for a full arms embargo on Israel now, enforced by workers in the factories, the docks and the airports.
