In February, US President Donald Trump declared that “The US will take over the Gaza Strip” and “level out” the remaining buildings and transfer the Palestinian population to “other countries.” At the time, both US and international media dismissed Trump’s plan as an “outlandish” scheme with no prospect of realization.
The Israeli government approached Trump’s plan with deadly seriousness. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu praised Trump’s “bold vision” for an ethnically cleansed Gaza. “We’re working on it,” Trump said during a meeting in Washington last month.
On Monday, the Netanyahu government effectively announced the beginning of the final stage of ethnic cleansing in Gaza. The plan includes a full military occupation of the entire Gaza Strip and the mass internment of the population in concentration camps under armed guard, as a prelude to forced marches through the desert or deportation by sea.
These concentration camps will be staffed by private US security contractors, with the Israel Defense Forces overseeing the distribution of starvation rations. According to a report this week by Reuters, the United States and Israel are actively discussing the formation of a “transitional government” headed by a US official to administer Gaza.
Echoing the “final solution,” the Nazi term for the genocide of Europe’s Jews, Netanyahu declared, “It’s time to launch the concluding moves.” The next day, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich explained the meaning of the Israeli government’s plan:
Within a year, ... Gaza will be entirely destroyed, civilians will be sent to ... the south to a humanitarian zone ... and from there they will start to leave in great numbers to third countries.
The mechanism for the forcible displacement of the Palestinian people will be mass starvation. As National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir made clear, “No electricity, and no other aid should be allowed—neither by the [Israeli military] nor by civil society.”
On March 2, Israel imposed a total blockade on all food, water and electricity entering the Gaza Strip. As a result, the majority of Gaza’s community kitchens have been forced to shut down due to a lack of supplies, and cases of acute malnutrition have surged by more than 80 percent. Harrowing images have circulated of emaciated, starving children—victims of a famine that is entirely man-made.
As Lama Bastami, director of the Legal Department at the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, explained:
The crime of starvation in Gaza is fully-fledged and committed in broad daylight; it requires no investigation committees or judicial rulings to prove it. It is enough to note that Israel has closed all crossings into the devastated Strip for over two months, completely banning the entry of food, medicine, and goods – a well-established reality openly acknowledged by Israeli officials without fear of accountability. Gaza is filled with irrefutable evidence of the crime’s horror: the emaciated bodies of people and children, tens of thousands lining up daily at charity kitchens, and the escalating death toll from hunger, malnutrition, and associated diseases.
The deliberate starvation of a population of two million people is being carried out with the full support not only of the Trump administration, but also of the Democratic Party. In April, Senate Democrats voted overwhelmingly against placing any restrictions on US arms shipments to Israel.
Bernie Sanders, often presented as a critic of the Netanyahu government, has repeatedly declared that “Israel has the right to defend itself.” He has denied that a genocide is taking place in Gaza, dismissively responding in February, “What genocide? You’ve got to be careful about that word.”
This week marks the 80th anniversary of the end of the Second World War in Europe, marked by the surrender of Nazi Germany. As the Red Army advanced and liberated the concentration camps of Eastern Europe, it uncovered overwhelming evidence of a campaign of mass extermination—carried out in secret—that murdered six million European Jews.
Opening the prosecution of Nazi leaders at the Nuremberg Tribunal, Justice Robert Jackson declared that the crimes of the Third Reich were “so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating, that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored, because it cannot survive their being repeated.”
The undeniable reality is that similar crimes are once again being committed—this time in full view of the world. Unlike the Nazis, who sought to conceal the scale of their atrocities, Israel is acting openly openly, with the eyes of the world watching. And yet, none of the institutions of so-called “international law”—the United Nations General Assembly, the International Court of Justice, the International Criminal Court—despite issuing vote after vote, ruling after ruling, have been able to stop it.
In recent decades, the imperialist powers have invoked allegations of war crimes to justify military interventions around the world—from the bombing of Yugoslavia to the denunciation of Russia in the Ukraine war. Today, however, the United States is openly sponsoring a genocide and campaign of ethnic cleansing on a scale far surpassing anything it has accused others of. It is pursuing a flagrantly criminal policy with complete impunity.
The open embrace of ethnic cleansing and mass starvation by the US and Israel has exposed the claim that protests against the Gaza genocide are driven by “antisemitism.” This monstrous lie has been used to criminalize protesters, who have been attacked by police and arrested en masse. Student visa holders have been disappeared in immigration facilities and been forced out of the country.
The Gaza genocide has been ongoing for one and a half years. During that time, millions of people have protested the criminal actions of the Netanyahu government and its imperialist backers. These protests, despite the heartfelt aspirations of its participants, have failed to shift policy.
Certain lessons must be drawn. The Gaza genocide is not an incidental event, caused by mistaken policy choices. It represents an open embrace by the imperialist powers of deliberate starvation, ethnic cleansing, and mass murder as part of the global eruption of imperialist war.
It is a component part of the creation of a “new Middle East,” to use the term Netanyahu borrowed from former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, under imperialist domination, as a central component of US war preparations against China.
The Gaza genocide sets a precedent not only in foreign policy, but also in domestic policy. The Trump administration, along with governments worldwide, views the Netanyahu government’s strategy of mass killing, internment, torture, and unbridled brutality as a model for their own actions at home.
A new strategy is necessary. In recent months, millions have taken part in mass protests against the Trump administration’s attacks on the social and democratic rights of the working class. There is enormous opposition to the administration’s mass layoffs of more than 100,000 federal workers, its assault on Social Security, the dismantling of public education, and the stoking of a global trade war that threatens to devastate jobs and living standards across the country.
The struggle to defend the social and economic rights of the working class must be united with the struggle against imperialist war and barbarism. This requires the mobilization of the working class, uniting the struggle to oppose the Gaza genocide with the defense of the social rights of the working class.
As World Socialist Web Site writer Jean Shaoul stated at this year’s International May Day rally, “Millions have marched and rallied in defense of the Palestinians. But this cannot succeed through moral appeals to any imperialist power or capitalist government. There must be a turn to the working class and to the methods and politics of class struggle.”
Stopping the Gaza genocide is inextricably connected to the political offensive of the international working class against capitalism and for socialism.