Yesterday Israel announced a ‘total’ blockade of Gaza, including a ban on food, electricity, water, and fuel.
Announcing this move to strangle Gaza, Israeli defence minister Yoav Gallant said that the Zionist state would cut electricity and block the entry of food and fuel as part of ‘a complete siege’ aimed at smashing the Palestinian struggle by starving 2.3 million people forced to live in the Gaza Strip.
For over 15 years, Palestinians living in Gaza have been subjected to constant siege conditions, and military attacks that have destroyed its infrastructure and killed countless men, women and children.
Now the Israeli government is determined to go all out to smash any Palestinian resistance once and for all by laying waste to Gaza with a total blockade and continuous air strikes that have already killed over 500 people, including 20 children.
This is the Israeli response to the massive shock delivered by Hamas on Saturday when the Palestinian resistance movement launched their biggest military operation against the occupying regime for many years.
Over 15 years of siege may have taken a heavy toll on the people of Gaza but it has failed to destroy their determination to fight against the Zionist occupiers who drove them off the land through terror.
On the contrary, it has produced a revolutionary uprising against the Zionist state, which was created and is propped up by US and world imperialism.
It is this determination to fight for their own land and their own independent state that has caused shock waves not just in Israel but throughout world imperialism. It wasn’t supposed to be like this for the imperialist nations.
Palestinians were supposed to meekly sit back and accept being treated as human cattle to be penned in and denied any freedom of movement while their land and sacred places of worship are constantly taken over by extremist settlers protected by the police and army.
The united response of the imperialist powers to this defeat inflicted by Hamas fighters has been to ‘stand with Israel’ and claim that Israel has the ‘right to self-defence against terrorism’.
It is not Hamas or the Palestinians who are terrorists but the apartheid Israeli state. Palestinians have the absolute right to take up arms against the illegal occupation of their land and the continuous acts of violence and murder carried out by the terrorist Zionist state.
The struggle of the Palestinians has won the overwhelming support of working people and youth throughout the world. Countless motions have been passed by British trade unions expressing solidarity with the Palestinian struggle and their fight for an independent state.
Today it is clear that expressions of solidarity are not enough. The working class must take heed of the barbaric measures being taken to starve the Palestinians in Gaza into total submission for having the temerity to fight for their rights.
Capitalism, in its final and most degenerate imperialist stage, must not be allowed to crush Gaza to impose its absolute power of life and death over Palestinians.
Capitalism is prepared to use the same violence against workers and youth at home who also have the temerity to challenge the right of the capitalist class to impose a dictatorship over them in order to protect the profits of the bosses and bankers.
In Britain, the Tories have already brought in all the laws to force workers to break strikes, laws enforced by the courts and police to prepare the ground for a violent confrontation between workers and the forces of the capitalist state.
The working class in Britain stands in the same trench as the Palestinians, facing the same enemy – a bankrupt capitalist system fighting to survive by smashing the resistance of workers.
The TUC in Britain must take a stand against the common enemy and face the fact that the next on the list for starving into submission is the working class at home.
The time has come to put solidarity into practice by demanding the TUC call a general strike to bring down the Tories and bring in a workers’ government that will not only recognise the independent state of Palestine but will provide it with all the material support it requires to grow and flourish.
