THE disintegration of the Zionist regime is becoming more and more public as reports emerge that over 100,000 Israelis have stopped showing up for reserve duty in the Israeli Occupation Force (IOF).
Despite a mass campaign by the government of prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, to keep the scale of the refusal to answer the call to join in the genocide in Gaza under wraps, it has become impossible to keep the scale of crisis in the Israeli state a secret.
On Thursday 10 April, nearly 1,000 Israeli pilots and aircrew published a statement across the Israeli media demanding a return of the captives held by Hamas and a permanent end to the war in Gaza.
The following day, the independent Israeli +972 Magazine reported that the Israeli army informed defence minister Israel Katz, in mid-March, that the attendance rate stood at 80% compared to around 120% at the start of the war on Gaza.
According to Israel’s national broadcaster, Kan, this figure was an exaggeration and the true rate of attendance was around 60% while other sources reported it as being 50% or lower.
Whatever the precise percentage of those refusing the call-up, the reality is that around 100,000 Israelis are either outright refusing, or simply disappearing off the radar of the military, when called up to serve in a war that is increasingly seen in Israel as unwinnable.
When Israel launched its murderous assault on Gaza in October 2023, the IOF reported it had recruited about 295,000 reservists to augment the roughly 100,000 regular soldiers, making the IOF massively dependent of these reservists.
Soon after the air force reservists published their open letter demanding an end to the war, despite being threatened with sacking, hundreds of reservists in the Navy and the elite intelligence squad Unit 8200 publicly joined the demand.
Last Sunday, over 250 former members of the Israeli security service, Mossad, along with doctors and ex-IOF paratroopers published their own letter in ‘full support’ of the air force letter, saying that it echoes their ‘deep concern for the future of the country’.
While the individual reasons for refusing to obey the legally binding call up demand by the Israeli state vary considerably, clearly a big motivation is the economic toll imposed on Israelis.
A recent survey by the Israeli Employment Service found 48% of reservists experienced a ‘significant’ loss of income, and 41% said they had been fired or forced to leave their jobs, due to extended periods in the reserves.
Thousands of companies in Israel have already closed down, and while the entire economy of the country and its military are completely dependent on the US pumping billions to keep it from collapse, President Trump has not excused the Zionist state from his tariff war.
Despite Netanyahu’s visit to Washington last week to plead with Trump, tariffs have not been lifted on Israel, and the Times of Israel this week reported that exports to the US will take a $2.3 billion hit, with between 18,000 to 26,000 Israelis likely to lose their jobs.
The Israeli Zionists regime is disintegrating from within, thanks to its total inability to deliver a defeat on the Palestinian people. Their heroic resistance to the plans hatched by the imperialist powers to ethnically cleanse Gaza and drive Palestinians from the occupied territories of the West Bank have failed.
Only the support of the imperialist governments, led by the US and faithfully followed by the Labour government in Britain, is keeping this collapsing regime from crumbling to dust.
The leaders of the trade unions have been equally complicit. They have been working tirelessly to keep the millions of workers and young people, who overwhelmingly support the Palestinian struggle against occupation, from taking action against their own capitalist governments.
This complicity must be ended and trade union leaders who refuse to mobilise against Zionist genocide must be removed and replaced by a leadership prepared to call general strikes to bring down their capitalist governments and go forward to workers governments.
These will organise alongside the Palestinians to smash the Zionist regime and provide all the material and political aid required for the complete victory of the Palestinian people and the building of the independent socialist state of Palestine.
