Break the Blockade of Gaza! Defeat ALL the Religio-Fascists

Break the Blockade of Gaza!
Defeat ALL the Religio-Fascists
Statement by the International Luxemburgist Network
1) Emergency Demands
The blockade of Gaza immediately threatens the lives of over two million people. The supply of water has become impossible without the electricity to pump it and the fuel to generate the electricity. The health system has entirely collapsed without electricity. The most basic solidarity with the people living in Gaza must make it the demand of the entire world workers movement that the blockade of Gaza end at once!
The ending of the blockade does not need the assent or cooperation of the government of Israel. Gaza is accessible by sea. We must demand that all governments that have the capacity send to Gaza ships loaded with the water, food, medical supplies AND fuel critically needed for survival. The naval forces of the participating governments must provide safe escort to these humanitarian ships to ensure against Israeli interception. Such humanitarian ships can also allow those who must or want to leave Gaza temporarily or permanently to do so, including the many wounded and sick in need of treatment.
Without an end to the bombardment of Gaza, distribution of such supplies is impossible. We join with the calls by the United Nations general Assembly and many other for an immediate ceasefire as well as the immediate withdrawal of Israeli troops from Gaza. The fastest route to such a cease fire and withdrawal is for workers organizations to demand that their governments, especially the government of the United States, immediately end the supplies of arms and ammunition to the government of Israel. Without such supplies, this criminal attack on the lives of Gaza civilians and the infrastructure needed to sustain their lives can’t continue.
2) These Demands are Essential
The total blockade of fuel has almost entirely eliminated the supply of water in Gaza. It takes power to pump water from wells and to run desalination plants and electricity is now almost entirely lacking without fuel to generate it. Water supplies are now well below 10% of pre-blockade levels. With no ability to access the very limited supplies of water still remaining, some Gazans are already starting to suffer from dehydration. The UN reports that it can provide those in its shelter with only 1 liter a day, one third of the minimum needed for survival. Dehydration can cause death within days.
The Israeli government’s claims that Hamas has its own reserves of fuel and water are totally irrelevant to the situation of the civilian population. Water that can last 40,000 fighters for two months can supply 2.4 million civilians for one day, by simple arithmetic. The 250,000 gallons of fuel than the Israeli government claims Hamas is storing amounts to less than a pint of gas per civilian.
The total blockade has, from the start, made the Gaza war into a war of annihilation against the civilian population. With nowhere to flee to and without the basis for life Gazans can’t survive even a few months of such a siege. Historically, since ancient times, sieges have resulted in total massacres.
3) These Demands are Realistic
The partial blockade of Gaza enforced by Israel and Egypt since 2005, as well as the total blockade imposed this month, is implemented on land by those two countries’ physical control of the land surrounding Gaza. But Gaza is on the Mediterranean coast and has a port. Israel has enforced its totally illegal blockade of Gaza by sea only by acts of piracy. In 2011 Israel intercepted and forcibly boarded supply ships bound for Gaza in international waters, killing some of those on board—acts that can only be described as piracy.
The dominant naval power in the Eastern Mediterranean is of course the United States’ Sixth Fleet. It was only with the implied (and probably explicitly conveyed) consent of the Untied States that Israel could and can use such flagrant piracy to enforce the blockade.
If the United States withdrew that consent and escorted relief ships to Gaza ports, it is utterly inconceivable that Israel’s armed forces would attack such ships. But it is equally inconceivable Israel would attack ships accompanied by French or British or Italian warships. Israel has no shadow of a right to intercept any shipping to Gaza, no matter what its war status or aims. The IDF and the Israeli government would not start a war with a major power.
It is entirely within the power of any of large European nations, or ,of course, of the United States, to unilaterally break the blockade and prevent the annihilation of the Gazan population.
It is entirely appropriate for the workers moment to demand that the naval forces of these capitalist states be used to protect vital supplies that save lives, rather than to destroy lives.
4) These demands side with workers against all divide and rule strategies
The Zionist movement began as an effort to split Jewish workers away from the socialist movement that so many of them supported and convert them into tools of imperialist control in the Middle East. Today, Israel, a state founded upon the massive ethnic cleansing and massacres of 1948 —the Nakba--and further enlarged by a brutal military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza begun in 1967, is among the most unequal in the West, even among Jews. To obscure and maintain the transfer of wealth from the workers, the Israeli ruling class requires a Spartan-like society, with a populace placed on a constant war footing on guard against the “enemy”.
But the Israeli government has come to more and more to resemble the “enemy”. The contradictions of the Zionist project, which promised a state both religious and democratic, have inevitably unraveled to the point that the Israeli government has dropped its secular pretensions and is dominated by religio-fascists (aided by the opportunistic Netanyahu) who entirely agree with the religio-fascist leadership of Hamas that women should be reduced to sex slaves and reproduction machines and that democracy is for weaklings. Both sides are equally unconcerned with the slaughter of civilians. The same religious justifications are used by not only the theo/kleptocrats of Israel and Gaza, but also those of Iran and—of the United States, where one just became Speaker of the House of Representatives.
These resemblances are not coincidental, but stem from the deliberate creation of an ideology aimed at dividing and ruling workers everywhere—an extension of the divisive foundation upon which Zionism was built in separating Jewish workers from all others. Israel created Hamas, just as the United States created Al-Qaeda. This is not in dispute—many Israeli officials openly admitted to funding the founding of Hamas as a counterweight to the Palestine Liberation Organization, the PLO. Predictably, Hamas turned against their former funders, just as Al-Qaeda did.
US President Biden inadvertently acknowledged his own callous view of the conflict when, during his last visit to Israel, he referred to Hamas as “the other team”, referring to the mass murder of thousands as an athletic contest between fundamentally aligned forces.
The Israeli government did not originate this process of manufactured fanaticism, although they have pushed it forward. It was the United States government, its CIA, together with Saudi forces that in the 1950’s first set up the Muslim Brotherhood and manufactured the “fundamentalist Islam” ideology to fight against socialist and communist movements throughout the Middle East. And it was American former FBI operative Meir Kahane who introduced the Jewish version of religio-fascism to Israel. Now this fanaticism, this religio-fascism, is showing its gory fangs, tearing apart thousands of lives of both Israelis and Palestinians.
Rosa Luxemburg, in her famous Junius pamphlet (written while imprisoned for opposing WWI), denounced the “‘civilized world” for its silence as German imperialism carried out the early 20th century genocide against the Herero people of southwest Africa. The “ravenous beasts” unleashed by capitalist Europe across Africa and the globe came back, she pointed out, to the imperial center in the form of the inter-imperialist war.
Today, the Zionist Isreali state is carrying out a genocidal campaign in Gaza. The workers’ movement must act now to stop the Gazan genocide, a barbarism that threatens not only the Palestinian masses but the entire global working class, including in Israel.
It is the task of workers everywhere to stand with the people of Gaza, the West Bank and Israel, not with their vile capitalist governments. All who live in the region, as everywhere, have the right to live where they choose, with equal rights for all, men and women, of all ethnic background, religions or lack of them. To stand with them is to stand against Zionism and the religio-fascists of all stripes.
5) These demands are a step toward a real solution
The demands to entirely lift the blockade of Gaza by reopening its port and to entirely terminate all arms supplies and arms funding of the Israeli government are vital initial steps toward ending the decades-long conflict in the territory of Israel and Palestine. First, the end of the blockade will end Israel’s effective control of Gaza. That will allow the revival of the strip’s economic activity and greatly strengthen the hand of working class forces to organize there and find ways to defend their basic democratic rights. At the same time, such steps will make clear to all in the region, of whatever religion or political persuasion, that the continuing occupation of the West Bank is untenable. If the support of the United States for the occupation is withdrawn, along with the armaments supply that props it up, the great majority of Israelis will come to see that there is no alternative to the unconditional withdrawal of its troops from the West Bank and Gaza.
Ending the occupation must be the first step in a process of creating one state—not Palestinian Bantustans—where ALL have equal rights--Jews, Palestinians, other ethnicities, and those of all religions, or none at all. These rights include the right of return of Palestinian refugees, and their descendants, who were driven from their homes during the creation of Israel and during the 1967 war.
Ending the current apartheid system, which privileges those designated as Jewish and reigns in Israel and across the occupied territories, is crucial for uniting workers to fight their common class enemies, not their class brethren.