The genocide implemented by the State of Israel against the proletarians in and around the Gaza Strip (leaving aside for the moment the „deeds” of Israeli settlers supported by their army in the West Bank) has not „only“ been responsible for 60 thousand or, according to some independent sources, 100 thousand deaths. How many future deaths are to come due to the consequences of crippling injuries, the impossibility of surviving after the loss of limbs, of being unable to access the necessary treatment for pre-existing health conditions or those that may have developed over whole months of unceasing slaughter or that will occur in the near future because of devastated hospital facilities? Or else, far more cruelly, due purely to hunger and malnutrition. There are many faces to genocide. The physical and material devastation from air, land and sea attacks on towns, villages and countryside is increasingly rendering more or less the whole of the region uninhabitable: how is survival possible amongst the tottering skeletons of the few houses still standing, along streets wiped out by bombing, amidst dry and unusable cisterns and water pipes, wrecked drainage and blown-up electricity networks, on a territory made uninhabitable by land-mines, radioactive munitions and poisoned soil and sub-soil?
And what is more… An article published in the French daily Le Monde on 25/6 informed us that „over 95% of agricultural land has been damaged or destroyed: there are no more cucumbers, tomatoes, watermelons, potatoes, strawberries“ - that is to say the 10% of the economy (mostly subsistence economy) still permitted by relentless Israeli persecution. „Over 500 thousand Palestinians,“ (the article informs us) “lived solely from agricultural production, cattle or fishing. In April [2025], only 4.6% of the total farmland (688 hectars) was still accessible and fit for farming, according to an analysis by the United Nations Organization for Food and Agriculture and the UN’s satellite station (Unostat), published on 26 May”. The study points out that this level of destruction „not only implies a loss of infrastructure: it is the end of the food and agricultural network and the possibility of life in Gaza. The farmland, greenhouses and wells have been destroyed and as a consequence local food production has been halted.“
In addition, almost 95% of cattle and over half the flocks of sheep and goats have been wiped out and only a small minority of fishermen still manage to put out to sea, using small rowing boats and keeping as close as possible to the shoreline for fear of being intercepted and shot down by drones or gunned down by the Israeli Navy (as has happened to at least 210 of them over the past few months): indeed, the coast of Gaza is considered by the Israeli army to be „a battle zone.“ Already at the start of 2002, we are again reminded by Le Monde, fishing grounds had been restricted from 20 sea miles to 6: „Along the Gaza coast, fishermen were concentrated in five points. The southernmost of these, at Rafah, was razed to the ground together with the town. In the extreme north of the Strip, there are no more boats or infrastructure.“ In Gaza City where a good fifty per cent of the fishermen worked and at least two thirds of the fishing fleet was to be found, a witness account published by the newspaper reports that already „on the fourth day of war, the occupying forces bombarded the port with their F-16, splitting it in two and leaving a crater of around 20 metres”. Boats, fish-processing plants and the fish market were all destroyed and fish farms have for some time proved to be unusable: it was a question of preventing the fishermen from guaranteeing food for the inhabitants of the Strip.
Even admitting that a truce may be reached sooner or later (a truce which, and this must be kept clearly in mind, can only be temporary), what sort of reconstruction can possibly take place in and around Gaza, subjected as it is to the bloodthirsty appetites of all imperialisms, both near and far? How many decades will it take to return some semblance of life to this blood-soaked place?
Meanwhile, more thousands of Palestinian proletarians will have died and those who manage to hang on will have searched in their thousands for shelter elsewhere (but where?). In this uncertain elsewhere they will nonetheless encounter their class brothers, the international proletariat and, standing alongside them, remember and avenge their dead, resuming the path of class war (class against class and not State against State or Fatherland against Fatherland!), fighting the original, monstruous enemy, which is capitalism, rendered even more savage and bloodthirsty by its imperialist phase.
July 2025
Breaking News. As we close this issue (in mid September) the genocide has taken the path of the
„final solution“. Gaza City is razed to the ground and hundreds of Palestinian proletarians are massacred by all sorts of sophisticated instruments of annihilation. Meanwhile we witness the revolting pantomime of complicity between all States, the tools of all bourgeoisies, from the local Arab variety to the western ones (led by the United States), which have always seen the State of Israel as a privileged business partner and a necessary armed gendarme defending an area that is precious for world capitalist interests; together with the hypocritical mutterings of all the international bodies that came into being in the post-war period to ensure the „radiant future“ of the capitalist régime, which today demonstrate not only their uselessness, but their eternal deference to the law of the most powerful, and above all to business. This must be the moment nor only for anger and mobilisation (it always has been this!), but also for a real and profound understanding of what has been represented by this last chapter in savage imperialism, in this case embodied by the State of Israel - the moment for an unforgiving appraisal of all the dynamics that have developed since that wretched 1948, dramatically locked in a roundabout of competing nationalisms, bloody religious feuds and crass interests, local or not. Above all, it must be the moment for a theoretical and practical return to a class analysis of events, which are already pre-announcing and outlining the scenarios of a new world war: the return to a true proletarian internationalism and, consequently, to revolutionary defeatism, openly fighting against the cancers of nationalism or patriotism.
