By Zara Ali
This May marks 77 years since the Nakba, the violent expulsion of over 750,000 Palestinians from their homeland. This caused 15,000 deaths, an influx of settlers, and the creation of the state of Israel in 1948.
After the Holocaust, Western powers began shutting their doors to Jewish refugees and raising the ‘solution’ of mass settlement in Palestine. The UN’s 1947 partition plan handed 55% of the country to Zionist settlers, who at the time owned just 6% of the land. Zionist militias launched a campaign of terror, massacring whole villages like Deir Yassin, burning crops, and driving out Palestinians at gunpoint. By 1949, Israel had seized 78% of historic Palestine, destroying 530 villages.
The survivors were forced into squalid refugee camps in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan—where millions remain to this day, denied their Right of Return under international law. This situation was further entrenched following the Six Day War in 1967.
Intifadas
It was the spontaneous uprising of young people during the First Intifada (1987–93) that led the USA to initiate the so-called ‘peace process’, which culminated in the Oslo Accords in 1993 and 1995. What had been the Palestinian Liberation Organisation became the basis for the Palestinian Authority, a subcontractor for the Israeli occupation. But successive right-wing Israeli governments reneged even on the feeble promises of Oslo.
This in turn provoked the Second Intifada (2000–2005). Israel responded with brutal repression, including the construction of the notorious Apartheid Wall, ruled illegal by the International Court of Justice (2004). Meanwhile, Israel accelerated its settler-colonial expansion, doubling down on apartheid policies: checkpoints, home demolitions, arbitrary arrests, and the siege of Gaza. The ‘peace process’ was always a fraud-—a cover for Israel’s gradual annexation of Palestine.
In 2006, when Palestinians elected Hamas in democratic elections, Israel and the West tried to prevent them taking power, but Hamas in Gaza refused to be removed. Israel then imposed a blockade on Gaza, turning it into an open-air prison, literally determining the amount of calories per day that are permitted to enter. In 2018, the Great March of Return saw 40,000 Gazans protest for their right to return—Israeli snipers gunned down over 200 unarmed demonstrators.
Gaza genocide
On 7 October 2023, Hamas staged a prison break from Gaza, in which 1,200 Israelis died, and some were taken captive. Israel’s response has been a genocidal campaign—flattening neighbourhoods, bombing hospitals, and starving 2.3 million people. For the last two months, all aid including food, fuel and medicine has been prevented from entering the Strip. The International Court of Justice has ruled that Israel is ‘plausibly’ committing genocide, yet Western governments continue to arm and fund it, while doing nothing to pressure Israel to relieve the humanitarian situation.
The year 2023 marked, not a shift in Israel’s objectives, but rather a terrifying escalation in its confidence that it would face no consequences from Western powers for its brutality. The deployment of AI targeting systems enabled unprecedented bombing efficiency, with strikes occurring every six minutes. Simultaneously, Israel weaponised starvation by blocking 98% of humanitarian food shipments while continuing to receive unimpeded arms deliveries from the United States and Germany.
The discovery of mass graves at Gaza’s hospitals chillingly echoed the ethnic cleansing tactics of 1948, demonstrating how contemporary technologies have simply made the Nakba’s original crimes more ruthlessly efficient. This brutal evolution reveals not a new strategy, but rather the same genocidal intent supercharged by modern military capabilities and unchecked Western support.
Towards a Global Intifada
What distinguishes the reaction to the Gaza genocide is its truly international character—from London’s marches of hundreds of thousands to student encampments occupying elite universities from Columbia to the LSE—with its potential to represent more than solidarity. Dockworkers in Barcelona, Genoa and Durban have refused to handle arms shipments, transforming trade unionism from symbolic gestures to material disruption of the war machine.
The Palestinian resistance has become what the Vietnamese struggle was in 1968 or the Spanish Civil War in 1936—a catalytic force radicalising a new generation. In Britain, the movement has shattered the consensus of Labourism, revealing Starmer’s administration as enforcers of imperialist interests. In the US, it has torn the mask off liberal hypocrisy, with Biden’s unconditional support for Israel sparking open rebellion within the Democratic base. Even Germany’s authoritarian crackdown on Palestinian solidarity has backfired, exposing the fascistic tendencies beneath its ‘never again’ posturing.
When South African trade unions block Zionist cargo ships, when British students occupy arms company headquarters, they’re not just supporting Palestine—they’re showing the kind of international class struggle needed to ultimately smash imperialism. They reflect a dawning recognition that Palestine is the frontline of a fragmenting and conflict-ridden imperialist order, creating wars across the world. Crucially, this movement has exposed the complicity of Western so-called democratic governments, with protesters directly confronting the fake ‘rules-based order’ that excuses and enables genocide.
The challenge now is to transform this militant solidarity into permanent structures building counter-power that can outlast the current crisis. Gaza has become the spark; the task of revolutionaries is to fan these embers into flames that consume the entire system of capitalist oppression.
Of course, the autocratic regimes in the Arab and Muslim world, Islamic republics, monarchies or military dictatorships remain a big obstacle. We need struggles, similar in scale to the Arab Spring, but going all the way to disintegrating these repressive state forces and creating organs of workers’ power. In Europe and North America, the solidarity movements need to set themselves the task of fighting and defeating the pro-Zionism of the liberal and social democratic parties and union bureaucracies and breaking these states’ supply and support for Israel’s genocide and ethnic cleansing.
This has once again reached a critical point with Israel’s total blockade of all supplies including food, fuel, and medicine, and relentless bombing of civilian refugees. The World Food Project has said that it has now run out of food, and community kitchens are running dangerously low. Even Britain and France have recently criticised this starvation tactic, but without meaningful action this will remain merely hollow phrase-mongering. We must call on our unions to end their shameful silence and inaction to force these governments to stop sending arms and providing intelligence to the genocide state.
