The current wave of Palestinian solidarity demonstrations is the biggest opportunity for rebuilding the revolutionary left in years. It’s no secret that the past decades have been cruel ones for the revolutionary left. Our organizations have divided and shrunk. The dissolution of the International Socialist Organization in this country and the bitter split of the New Anticapitalist Party in France are only the best known examples of our retreat.
Chicago represents a test case for how a “sanctuary” city can welcome an influx of migrants, when as many as 2.4 million asylum seekers have crossed the southern border in the last year. Hundreds of migrants arrive weekly on buses dispatched by the right-wing governors of Texas and Florida.
Israel is now turning its attentions to the southern part of Gaza. Of course, this is the part of Gaza that the Israeli government urged Palestinians to flee to as a “safe zone”. Now the “safe zone” itself is under heavy attack. This fact alone decisively dashes any illusion that Israel has any concern whatsoever for “civilian casualties”.
The truth is that the current aggression against Gaza constitutes, in the clearest possible form, a genocidal war that includes mass murder and “ethnic cleansing”, two crimes against humanity in the classification of international law. These crimes exceed qualitatively everything committed by the Zionist armed forces since 1949 until today and are comparable to what happened during the Nakba.
As U.S officials laud an “elder statesman” and “erudite strategist,” the rest of us, and surely millions of brown-skinned people, celebrate the end of an “iconic napalm rights advocate” whose lies, hubris, towering inhumanity and many blood-soaked foreign policy follies left a legacy – in Vietnam, Chile, Cambodia, Argentina – of an “enormous pile of corpses” that may number four million.
