Genocide Supporters Don't Get to Claim the Moral High Ground
The State of Israel is currently carrying out a genocide and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in Gaza. No amount of propaganda, lies, smears, intimidation, or state repression can change that brutal fact. Gaza’s health ministry reported that as of Nov. 21, Israeli attacks have killed 14,128 Palestinians, including 5,840 children. More than 33,000 have been wounded. Images and video across social media show Palestinian children slaughtered and journalists grieving the murder of their entire families. Israel has cut off access to food, water, fuel, and electricity in Gaza. It is deliberately bombing hospitals, killing countless doctors and patients, including babies who died after incubators ran out of power.
Israeli officials have made no secret of their genocidal intentions, referring to Palestinians as “human animals", calling to turn Gaza into a “city of tents” or even to drop a nuclear weapon on the Gaza Strip. The amount of bombs Israel has dropped in Gaza since Oct. 7 is already the equivalent of two Hiroshima bombs. The Israeli government is openly killing as many Palestinians as possible, and seeking to drive Gaza residents across the border into Egypt, from which it hopes they will never return. Supporters of Israel abroad have also displayed the most vile racism and bloodlust as they cheer on the ethnic cleansing of a subjugated people who have lived under military occupation for 75 years.
In this context, it’s frankly pathetic to watch Zionists try to attack people who have expressed solidarity with Palestine. All they have are lies and smears, falsely equating criticism of Israel with antisemitism. The Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA), a Zionist organization in Canada, has repeatedly shared videos and blatantly lied about what pro-Palestine demonstrators are saying. Recently it shared footage of students at a rally chanting, “Trudeau, Trudeau, you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide!” and claimed the students were chanting, “Judah, Judah, you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide!” It eventually took down the tweet after much criticism, but without apology or explanation.
Columnist Brian Lilley of right-wing tabloid the Toronto Sun offered another example this week when he tweeted footage, also from CIJA, of a keffiyeh-clad youth at a pro-Palestine rally in Toronto leading the crowd in chants of, “Long live the resistance! There is only solution! Intifada, revolution! Long live the intifada!” Lilley sneered, “In this context, the resistance is Hamas, a terrorist group. The kid, is cheered on by adults. The intifada in this context is also Hamas. Terrorism.”
Throughout Israel’s assault on Gaza, we have seen attempts to equate support for Palestinians with support for Hamas. The IMT’s statement “Down with hypocrisy! Defend Gaza!” refutes this cynical line of attack from a Marxist perspective:
Our enemies will say: then you support Hamas. To this accusation we will answer: we have never supported Hamas. We do not share its ideology, nor do we condone the methods it uses.
We are communists and have our own ideas, programme and methods, based on the class struggle between rich and poor, oppressors and oppressed. It is this that determines our attitude in every case.
But our differences with Hamas, though fundamental, are not nearly so fundamental as the differences that separate us from US imperialism – the most reactionary force on the planet – and its accomplices in crime, the Israeli ruling class.
Our critics will ask: do you agree with the killing of so many innocent civilians? We will answer that we have never advocated such things. Nor do we condone them.
Our first task, to quote Spinoza, is neither to weep nor laugh, but understand. Moral considerations are utterly useless to explain anything. In order to understand what is happening, it is necessary to pose the question in a different way: what was it that led to Hamas’ attack?
Can it be separated from the decades of oppression, violence and occupation of Palestine by the reactionary state of Israel?
Of course not.
Israel is a powerful and wealthy state that has for decades been dispossessing and oppressing the Palestinians by a combination of brute force and economic muscle.
And we must also see the chain of events that have led directly to the present situation. It did not drop from a clear blue sky, as we are asked to believe.
The conflation of support for Palestine with support for Hamas is a red herring, put forward by imperialist leaders and propagandists to distract from the larger context: of Israel’s institutional racism and occupation of Palestinian land; of subjugation and violent oppression generations of Palestinians have lived under; and of Israel’s ongoing mass murder of civilians, nearly half of whom are children, in a calculated act of genocide and ethnic cleansing.
Former Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, himself the target of an unprecedented smear campaign falsely accusing him of antisemitism due to his solidarity with Palestinians, recently wrote in an op-ed for Al-Jazeera:
The International Criminal Court defines genocide according to several criteria. Genocide can be committed by killing, causing serious bodily or mental harm, deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about physical destruction, imposing measures intended to prevent births, or by forcibly transferring children. In each case, there must be an intention to destroy, in whole or in part, a particular national, ethnic, racial or religious group.
On November 2, seven UN Special Rapporteurs said they “remain convinced that the Palestinian people are at grave risk of genocide”. This followed the resignation of Craig Mokhiber, the Director of the UN’s office in New York, who characterised the horrors in Gaza as a “textbook case of genocide” aimed toward “the expedited destruction of the last remnants of indigenous life in Palestine”.
When you support an ongoing genocide, like the one Israel is currently carrying out in Gaza, you do not get to claim the moral ground. Israel supporters will of course respond by denying this reality. They’ll try to shift the conversation to Hamas, or say they support Israel’s “right to defend itself”. They’ll go on the attack and accuse anyone who criticizes Israel of being an antisemite. Indeed, we’ve reached the point where you will be called a Nazi for opposing genocide. But these dishonest, evasive attacks only highlight how the entire edifice of Israel and Zionism is built on lies. All these responses from Israel supporters only serve to justify Israel’s ethnic cleansing and genocide of Palestinians.
To use the historical analogy Zionists are most familiar with: when Nazi Germany invaded the U.S.S.R. and committed genocide against Jews, Romani people, and Soviet civilians, it wouldn’t matter if Nazi officials denied these mass killings; if they tried to shift the conversation to “terrorist” attacks by partisans; if they said the Third Reich had “the right to defend itself” by shoring up its Lebensraum, or if they accused critics of being motivated by a hatred of German people. Such attempts to defend Nazi crimes would be greeted by laughter by most today. Yet these are exactly the ways another imperialist ethnostate now seeks to justify its own crimes against humanity.
Anyone who tries to defend Israel’s attack on Gaza is defending Israel’s genocide of Palestinians, which means they forfeit any credibility. No one with a shred of humanity has any reason to take seriously supporters of a racist state perpetrating genocide. No one who supports a state perpetrating genocide has authority to lecture anyone else on morality. Zionists should be shunned in the same way as Nazis. If you defend a racist regime that brutalizes and murders a people under decades-long occupation; if you justify bombing hospitals and the slaughter of thousands of children, in an area where millions of people are trapped with no escape, you have no moral standing to attack those who stand with the oppressed.