By Mya Shone (including an article by Dominique Ferré)
[Reprinted from The Organizer https://socialistorganizer.org
“So far, the IAF (Israeli Air Force) has dropped about 6,000 bombs against Hamas targets,” boasted the IAF October 12 on X (formerly Twitter), in a post replete with four images of the wasteland that once was Gaza City. According to military experts, it was an unprecedented hailstorm of bombs in a concentrated area. Israel pummeled Gaza with more bombs in less than a week than the U.S. had used in all of Afghanistan in a year.By the end of the second week, one-third of Gaza homes had been destroyed or damaged, along with hospitals, schools, churches, mosques, and essential infrastructure — roads, water, electricity, and communication facilities.
“Gaza will become a place where no human being can exist,” wrote Giora Eiland, October 10, in the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth. Eiland, a retired Major General in the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) as well as former head of the Israeli National Security Council, knows of what he speaks.
In this, U.S. rulers are complicit. In the May 2021 assault on Gaza, two-and-a-half years ago, the IAF flew F-15 and F-35 fighter jets, purchased with grants from the U.S. Congress. The planes dropped 2,000-pound bunker-buster bombs that can level high-rise buildings and gravity bombs fitted with JDAM guidance kits to hit designated GPS coordinates, all manufactured in the U.S. and also purchased with U.S. grants.
In the midst of the 2021 attack, the Biden administration authorized the sale of $735 million in bunker buster bombs to replenish the IDF stock of weapons — the bombs in use today.
As 300,000 Israeli troops stand poised to invade what remains of Gaza, Biden has guaranteed that the ground troops will be amply supplied. Israel received already tens of thousands of 155 mm rounds used to pierce armored vehicles, while a million rounds of 7.62 mm ammo for machine guns and sniper rifles, along with tens of thousands of 30 mm rounds used in attack helicopters, are on their way — all to be used against a mostly unarmed people, half of whom are children.
If that were not enough, on October 20, Biden sent a supplemental military request to Congress, including a further $14 billion to re-arm Israel. The request followed on the heels of an address in which Biden invoked President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s plea to a wary public at the outbreak of World War II that the United States must be the “arsenal of democracy” and so arm England even before the U.S. entered the war.
“End All Aid to Apartheid Israel” is an essential demand to stop the genocide against the Palestinian people and better allocate the billions of dollars towards education, housing, and social welfare.
The Global Context
Let us now put the ever-expanding war budget in a global context.
“From One War to Another” is the title of an article by Dominique Ferré, October 17, in La Tribune des Travailleurs (Workers Tribune). Ferré describes the unfolding three-front imperialist war (Europe, the Middle East, and Asia), funding for which was included in Biden’s $106 billion supplemental military request.
Ferré’s article reads as follows
“’The State Israel is our best investment at $3 billion a year. If the State of Israel didn’t exist, the United States of America would have to invent one, to protect its interests in the region.’
“These were Joe Biden’s exact words, spoken before Congress on June 5, 1986 when he was a senator. They couldn’t be more in tune with reality: U.S. imperialism has been financing the State of Israel since 1948, on the condition that Israel ‘protects U.S. interests.’
“Israel’s leaders, led by Netanyahu, have their own logic – that of Zionism, which extends colonization ever further, expelling and massacring the Palestinian people in their wake. Hence, the Zionist leaders seized upon the Hamas attack on October 7 to unleash a war to the death on Gaza, provoking the start of a new Nakba.[1]
“But the U.S. administration, for its part, is engaged in its war against Russia on Ukrainian territory. It is actively preparing a war against China. It doesn’t need a new front in the Middle East, while the conflict in Ukraine is getting bogged down.
“Putin and Zelensky have understood this. The former (though a friend of Israel) compared Gaza to ‘the Nazi siege of Leningrad.’ Zelensky, on the other hand, was anxious that NATO might ‘turn the world’s attention away from Ukraine.’
“Then, on October 16, the U.S. press sent Netanyahu a torpedo, making it public that the CIA and Egyptian services had warned him in advance of the Hamas attack.
“On the same day, the U.S. administration urged Israel to loosen the total blockade of Gaza. In an effort to defuse the situation and prevent a regional conflagration, Biden sent his Secretary of State to negotiate with the Emirate of Qatar, the headquarters of the Muslim Brotherhood to which Hamas is affiliated.
“Biden leaned on Egypt’s Marshal Sissi, who, complicit in 16 years of Israeli blockade of Gaza, does not want the arrival of 2 million Palestinian refugees in Egypt, fearing the outbreak of a social explosion.
“Biden has also made a tacit agreement with Iran: the U.S. will not intervene directly in Gaza, in exchange for which the Lebanese Hezbollah will not attack Israel in the north.
“Once again, for the past 75 years, it is the great powers that make the decisions concerning the lives, and above all the deaths, of the inhabitants of Palestine, whether Arabs or Jews.
“It is urgent that they be able to decide for themselves and impose a democratic solution based on equal rights for all, from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River, and on the right of return for all refugees.”
All out for the demonstrations across the U.S. and worldwide:
• End All Aid to Apartheid Israel
• For a Democratic and Secular Palestine: from the river to the sea (with the right of return)
ENDNOTE
[1] The Nakba, the “catastrophe” refers to the 1948 expulsion of 800,000 Palestinians by Zionist paramilitary forces and the newly created IDF. Israel Shahak, who had been the Chairperson of the Israeli League for Human and Civil Rights, documented the destruction of 385 Palestinian villages along with the seizure of Palestinian homes, businesses and other property across the breadth of historic Palestine.
In 1967, another 280,000 to 325,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled when Israel seized the West Bank and Gaza. Ten more Palestinian villages were destroyed and two United Nations refugee camps, Aqabat Jabr and Ein el-Sultan, both near Jericho in the Jordan Valley, were emptied of their inhabitants.
