Letter from Gaza- Two Million People Learning Collectivity here ♦ Develop New Communist Leaders Amidst Wreckage of the old World Order here ♦ Working Class Unity Under Fascist Conditions here ♦
Manchester, England February 2024: Rally against genocide in Gaza
Letter from Gaza: “Two Million People Are Learning to Live Collectively”
Greetings comrades,
I am still alive. I have not been able to communicate regularly with you. We are constantly moving from one site of massacre to another. I have seen people next to me just hours ago getting blown into charred human flesh. My ability to have cell phones recharged is limited. I must take my flash drive to a location where the internet is available. Several small children in the refugee camp volunteer to take the flash drive. The cell towers are targeted by Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) snipers. But small children take the risk.
I can report to you of horrors beyond the imagination, of the wailing and inconsolable grief one hears when the IDF deliberately targets the most densely populated refugee areas with the help of Artificial Intelligence. Then there are frantic scenes of injured people, their agony of amputation without anesthesia, doctors and hospital staff desperately trying to save every life.
This imperialist genocide has brought out the best in the working class. Money has lost its meaning. People are collectively learning how to survive. There are schools that teach children how to harvest rainwater, how to install solar panels from the ruins, and how to sterilize injured people. Young people are learning how to break into the IDF tank operators’ conversations to find out their location and evade them.
There are thousands of volunteers and older teachers showing new skills to resist genocide. I have shared Red Flags and people say, “We did not know what communism was but what we are doing is the communist way of building our society based on need and necessity. We cannot go back to the old way of living. That way of living was based on the profit of rich people. Now we fear nothing. Our homes, hospitals, and schools are destroyed. We want to build everything but not the old way.”
Thanks for sharing a recent comment from a comrade from Israel. It was heartwarming to hear from him. Many of my friends were reassured by knowing that thousands of working-class Israelis would not support the genocide. The Israeli comrade wrote, “The Israeli government is on an insane rampage. They have alienated many. This is an opportunity to build a communist base among the masses.”
I just want to say, comrades, that two million people in Gaza are learning to resist collectively. Masses of people see death as a real possibility every second. So, they value life, they are building a new way of life – collectivity.
We have to transform this opportunity into a worldwide fight for communism, as the Israeli comrades said. No Zionists can stop us. The more they try, the stronger becomes our determination to end their fascist regime. Communism is the future.
— Comrade Hamza, February 2, 2024
We Must Develop and Become New Communist Leaders Amidst the Wreckage of Gaza and the Old World Order
February 14— When the carnage in Gaza ends, the world will have changed dramatically. Israel’s image as a defiant response to fascist horrors has been shattered. The USA’s post-World War II image as a beacon of justice and liberty will likewise be definitively shredded.
Both images were lies. Now they are dead and buried, like tens of thousands of our working-class family, under the rubble in Gaza.
Whatever the outcome on the ground, the USA (once the world’s most powerful military) and Israel (the world’s tenth most powerful) will have been defeated.
It’s Not Just Images
The US rulers have sent Israel over 250 cargo planes, plus twenty ships. They have delivered over 10,000 tons of munitions since Israel’s attack on Gaza began. On top of its routine $3.8 billion in military aid, the Israeli military (IDF) has bought almost $2.8 billion in extra weaponry this year. The US government is blatantly funding this genocide.
Those US rulers are increasingly isolated. A thousand Black US pastors have urged Biden to pull back from the Gaza genocide. These pastors have the impossible task of controlling the Black masses for the Democratic Party. Working-class people, especially youths and those who experience racist oppression, see no difference between the open fascist Trump and Genocide Joe Biden.
US imperialism can still bully some countries into defunding UNRWA (humanitarian aid) and voting in the UN to support genocide in Gaza. But dozens of governments have joined South Africa in accusing Israel of genocide in the International Court of Justice. The global divide between the US bloc and the “global south” is widening.
Countries are lining up to join the BRICS alliance (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa). Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, and the United Arab Emirates already joined. One hundred fifty-nine countries are interested in Russia’s new payment system to bypass the US dollar.
China, with 35% of the world’s industrial production, is now the world’s economic superpower. China, Russia, and Iran are successfully bogging the US down in Israel. They are baiting it to respond in Yemen and regionally. This is blocking US imperialism from getting more involved in Taiwan and Ukraine.
Israel is in crisis, deeply divided. More Israelis see that a Zionist ethno-state is no longer sustainable.
By the second month of the current carnage, half a million Israelis had fled. The Israeli government had sold the illusion of safety by bombing hospitals, schools, apartment buildings (with dumb bombs) and targeting ambulance drivers, journalists, and poets (with smart bombs).
Gaza had long been the world’s largest prison. It had endured four Israeli attacks since 2006. Now the hospitals left in Gaza have a new acronym pinned to many patients’ beds: WCNSF — Wounded Child No Surviving Family.
By November, masses worldwide were seeing the Israeli state and the Zionist project on which it was based as modern-day fascism.
The world changed too. We saw genocide unfold on our TVs, Instagram, or YouTubes. Our outrage exploded into massive protests on every continent. Half a million marched in London. Palestinian flags were everywhere, many waved by Jewish youth. But the bombing continued relentlessly.
What can we do to make a difference?
Then came a letter from Gaza.
A Red Flag reader in Gaza, homeless and threatened constantly by bombs and tanks, joined the International Communist Workers’ Party (ICWP). Weeks passed. Then came a second letter. It recounted an exciting conversation with an older Palestinian who remembered how his father had agitated, educated, and organized for communist revolution alongside a Jewish comrade, a lifelong friend.
As Israel dropped more explosive tonnage on Gaza than the US dropped on Hiroshima, a red flag future began to re-emerge from communist history.
Through the development of its newspaper and media, ICWP is starting to organize for a communist revolution: from the masses to the masses. The new comrade and his collective, seemingly isolated in the hell of Gaza, lead an international mass party to respond to capitalist war. He takes hope from the courage and creativity of the youth, and the knowledge that his ICWP comrades are organizing around the world.
The world is changing dramatically. There is a new openness to communism. Workers and youth worldwide are seeing the horrors of capitalism in previously unimaginable ways. We must develop strong relationships with them so that they, in turn, mobilize the workers, soldiers, and youth around them.
This communist work is developing in the auto factories in Chennai, India and the maquila sweatshops of El Salvador; in working-class neighborhoods of Bengaluru, India and Gqeberha, South Africa, in high schools in Seattle, Portland, and Los Angeles, USA.
Many more readers must become communist leaders. All Party collectives must take up this work with new urgency. Let’s seize this opportunity to build a new communist world on the rubble of Gaza and of the coming world war.
Palestine/Israel: Building Working Class Unity Under Fascist Conditions
It’s been seventy-five years since the ethnic cleansing of Palestine and the establishment of the Zionist state of Israel. Unsurprisingly, the movement against the genocide in Gaza and the violent occupation of the West Bank often takes the form of Palestinian nationalism.
We’ve learned bitter lessons from too many national liberation struggles worldwide. One example: Cyril Ramaphosa led a miners’ union in apartheid South Africa. He now heads the government that sent the military to murder striking miners in Marikana in 2012.
The South African government has made itself look good on the world stage by bringing charges of genocide against the Israeli government. But capitalism lives on in South Africa with its racism, poverty, and exploitation. In South Africa and in Palestine/Israel, ending racism and exploitation will take a united working class led by a revolutionary communist party.
Today we see the seeds of working-class unity in Palestine/Israel: in the mass organizations and social interactions that bring Jews and Palestinians together, especially the organizations of former soldiers breaking the silence. That’s why Red Flag emphasized the history of working-class unity under the British Mandate (1922-1947) in here.
As the lead author of this article, it now seems to me that we made it look easy. And that’s a distortion. While Arab and Jewish workers marched together in the streets of Tel Aviv, Zionist terrorist militias, organized under the mandate, were attacking Palestinian villages and Jews they accused of being “too friendly” with Palestinians. These terrorist militias became the backbone of the Israeli “Defense” Force
Similar fascist attacks take place today. Settlers violently displace Palestinian families from their homes on the West Bank. Mobs block trucks from delivering life-saving aid to starving children in Gaza. Israeli student mobs attack Israeli educators for pro-Palestinian posts on social media.
The historical struggle of the international working class has been the fight for working-class unity for a world without capitalist exploitation, national borders, and imperialist war. This movement has grown despite, and in opposition to, fascist gangs who threaten our class. We have suffered casualties. We continue the fight in memory of our fallen comrades.
We salute the comrades in Palestine/Israel and elsewhere who are planting the seeds of the revolutionary class struggle. United, we will defeat fascist capitalism and build the communist world that we need.
—Internationalist Comrade in the US
LOS ANGELES (USA), February 10— “This is Red Flag, from the International Communist Workers’ Party,” said a comrade at the Labor for Palestine rally. “We are mobilizing the masses for communism, to eliminate genocide, war, borders, exploitation, and everything else that affects the masses here and around the world.” He continued: “In the past, and even now, so-called ‘communist’ parties have not mobilized for communism. Even the Russian revolution maintained banks and wages, and supervisors and managers got paid more than regular workers. Whenever and wherever we make a revolution, we will immediately set up communist relations in all spheres of life.” No one refused to take the paper. Many were reading it. A worker approached him and said, “I’m a communist too. And I believe that at the end of the day it’s between communism and fascism. There’s no middle ground. Can I have a paper too?” “Of course,” the comrade responded.