Over the past 30 days, no food, water or electricity has entered Gaza. Israel is deliberately starving everyone who remains in the enclave, as part of a plan to ethnically cleanse the Palestinian population and, as US President Donald Trump threatened on March 12, annex their land.
Israel’s renewed onslaught on Gaza, in which 400 people were killed in a single day last month, has been accompanied by unspeakable war crimes. This week, the Guardian reported that Israeli troops bound and summarily executed 15 aid workers, including one employee of the United Nations.
In the face of this horrific new phase of the Gaza genocide, the US media has launched a two-pronged effort to cover up these US-Israeli war crimes. The first is silence: The daily killings have largely dropped from the front pages of the major newspapers and go unreported on the evening news.
This silence has been accompanied by a systematic campaign in every major US publication to promote small, politically heterogeneous demonstrations that took place over the past week in Gaza, whose slogans allegedly included opposition to Hamas.
In one example of many, the New York Times published a column by neoconservative warmonger Bret Stephens titled, “Here Is the Real Route to Freeing Palestinians.” Stephens hailed the protests in Gaza last week “to demand an end to 18 years of Hamas’s violent misrule in the territory. Demonstrators could be heard shouting, ‘Out, out, Hamas, get out’ and ‘Hamas are terrorists,’ while displaying banners saying, ‘Hamas does not represent us.’”
In his column, Stephens claimed that if Palestinians would cease resisting the Israeli occupation, Israel would allow them to have their own state. Stephens clarified, however, that he is condemning not only armed struggle but also the very thought of resistance, including the internationally recognized right of families displaced during the 1948 Nakba to return to their homelands.
As Stephens explains, “For Palestinians, that will mean not only abandoning terrorism and guerrilla warfare but also the more insidious forms of seeking Israel’s destruction, such as the spurious call for a right of return for the descendants of Palestinian refugees.”
The same day that the New York Times published Stephens’ column, Jacobin magazine, affiliated with the Democratic Socialists of America, published an article by Bashir Abu-Manneh with an effectively indistinguishable position, structure, and talking points to that of Stephens.
Jacobin wrote, “Demonstrators in some of the most decimated areas of North Gaza chanted ‘The people want to overthrow Hamas’ and ‘Hamas get out.’ One protester summarized popular feelings well when he said, ‘We demonstrated today to declare that we do not want to die. Eventually, it is Israel that attacks and bombs, but Hamas also bears direct responsibility.’”
Abu-Manneh wrote that “Protesters were also particularly critical of Hamas and its costly form of resisting the Israeli occupation.” The protesters condemned, according to Jacobin, “Hamas’s systematic failure to protect Palestinian civilians during this war.”
While the article includes an extensive section criticizing the genocidal actions of Israel, it makes these points within the context of the assertions that these actions were triggered by the resistance of the Palestinians themselves. Jacobin writes, “Genocide is the intended consequence of Israel’s war. It is Israel’s vengeance for October 7.”
In other words, had there been no armed resistance to the illegal Israeli occupation on October 7, there would be no Israeli war in Gaza. In making this statement, Jacobin is echoing the official position of the Netanyahu government, the Biden administration and the Trump administration, all of whom have claimed that Israel’s current war is a “response” to October 7.
This lying claim serves to scapegoat resistance by the Palestinian people to their subjugation and displacement for the criminal actions of Israel. It is, moreover, a complete and total fabrication.
The Netanyahu government has for years been seeking, and actively planning, the full ethnic cleansing of Palestine and its annexation. Just two weeks before the October 7 attacks—which were facilitated by a deliberate stand-down by Israeli forces—Netanyahu traveled to the United Nations to show a map of Israel having fully annexed the West Bank and Gaza as part of what he called the “New Middle East.”
Responding to the media’s promotion of the demonstrations, Mustafa Barghouti, the head of the Palestinian National Initiative and a political opponent of Hamas, refuted the absurd claim that Israel would cease its ethnic cleansing if Hamas laid down its arms.
Barghouti asked, “Does Hamas rule the West Bank? Isn’t what is happening now ethnic cleansing in Jenin, Tulkarm, and Nablus? Right now, in the West Bank, we are under attack... Social and economic life is being destroyed.”
He continued,
So, what did Netanyahu say? He said, “No to Hamas, no to Fatah, no to the PLO, and no to any unified Palestinian national entity.” Therefore, the issue is not about Hamas. The issue is the Palestinians’ right to remain in their homeland, their right to resist aggression, and their right to struggle for their freedom.
Barghouti added,
We have been living 77 years since the Nakba, with no hope of changing the situation, and 57 years under occupation in the West Bank, Gaza, and Jerusalem, where settlement expansion is taking place everywhere.
The purpose of the Jacobin article is to delegitimize the opposition by the Palestinian people to their illegal occupation, oppression, and extermination, and thereby to justify the Gaza genocide.
Jacobin is an instrument of the Democratic Party, and hence of the American state. Its purpose is to posture as an opponent of US foreign policy while in reality promoting pro-imperialist politics in the guise of left-wing opposition. Its declaration that the Palestinians are responsible for the genocide, shocking though it is, is completely in keeping with its role.