Over the weekend, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) announced the full-scale launch of “Operation Gideon’s Chariots,” which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described as the “concluding moves” in Gaza. The language echoes the “Final Solution”—Nazi Germany’s term for the systematic extermination of Europe’s Jews.
The aim of the operation is the total military conquest and occupation of the Gaza Strip, the forced internal displacement of the remaining population into concentration camps in the south, and preparations for their expulsion from Palestine altogether.
The operation will be accompanied by a joint US-Israeli takeover of food distribution to the imprisoned population, with American logistics firms and private military contractors dispensing starvation-level rations to pre-screened individuals, identified through facial recognition technology.
Behind the scenes, the Trump administration is orchestrating the largest imperialist-backed ethnic cleansing operation since the Holocaust. The White House is negotiating with the regimes in Libya and Syria—whose governments were overthrown by US-backed Islamist insurgencies—to accept more than 1 million forcibly displaced Palestinians, either by boat or over land.
Eighty years after the end of World War II, the greatest crimes of Nazi Germany—mass extermination, deliberate mass starvation and ethnic cleansing—are being carried out and normalized by the imperialist powers.
But while the architects of the Holocaust sought to conceal the scale of their crimes from the German population and the world, the genocide in Gaza is unfolding in full view. The American president has openly declared the ethnic cleansing and annexation of Palestine to be a strategic objective of his administration.
While the genocide in Gaza is spearheaded by Trump and Netanyahu, it has been defended and legitimized by all the imperialist powers and enabled by the bourgeois Arab regimes.
The imperialist governments legitimize mass murder and ethnic cleansing by asserting that Israel “has the right to defend itself.” Across Europe, every government has fraudulently denounced protests against the genocide as “antisemitic,” carrying out mass arrests and persecuting those who speak out against the crimes of the Israeli state.
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz has invited Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Germany, vowing to defy a warrant by the International Criminal Court for Netanyahu’s arrest.
Trump’s trip to Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates has put on display before the entire world the complicity of the Arab regimes in the Gaza genocide. As Trump funnels billions of dollars in bombs to Israel for the destruction of Gaza, the Qatari royal family has given Trump the gift of a $400 million private jumbo jet.
Despite issuing pro-forma statements condemning the starvation of Palestinians, the Arab regimes are complicit in the genocide and forced displacement of the population in Gaza.
As recounted by journalist Bob Woodward in his book War, Jordanian King Abdullah II told Secretary of State Antony Blinken in 2023, “Israel must defeat Hamas. We will not say this publicly, but we support the defeat of Hamas.” Woodward also wrote that Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi told Blinken that his regime “only wants to maintain peace with Israel,” even as Israel was massacring the Palestinians.
The institutions of “international law” have proven themselves completely bankrupt in the face of the ongoing genocide. Half a century of imperialist-sponsored “peace plans,” innumerable votes in the UN General Assembly and Security Council, rulings by the International Court of Justice and charges by the International Criminal Court have proven completely meaningless.
What is unfolding in Gaza, a crime of monumental proportions, has the most far-reaching political implications. It exposes the essential nature of imperialism and all “democratic” capitalist governments. In his imperishable analysis of imperialism, written in 1916 in the midst of World War I, Lenin warned that the distinction between bourgeois democracies and the old monarchical autocracies was being obliterated. A century later, modern imperialist regimes, the self-proclaimed defenders of human rights, justify, support and even applaud the mass murder of an entire population.
The normalization of genocide is an inseparable component of the intensification of attacks on democratic rights, the impoverishment of the working class and the war plans of the imperialist governments. In all of the imperialist capitals, from Washington to Berlin, London and Tokyo, governments are massively expanding military spending while slashing social programs.
While the leaders of every imperialist government—and their Middle Eastern client regimes—support the genocide carried out by Israel, the overwhelming majority of the world’s population is horrified by these crimes. In cities and towns across the globe, millions of people—including countless thousands of Jews—have joined mass protests against the Gaza genocide. An unbridgeable chasm has opened between the mass of the world’s people, outraged by the genocide, and their governments.
Nineteen months since the start of the genocide, it is necessary to draw certain fundamental conclusions. First and foremost, it is impossible to stop the Gaza genocide through appeals to the imperialist powers or the institutions of international law. The only way to stop the massacre in Gaza is through the mobilization of the working class. The struggle against the Gaza genocide depends on the expansion of the class struggle and the defense of the social, economic and political rights of the working class.