Since Teheran-backed Hamas death squads carried out a wave of pogroms, killing over 1,400 Jews and others at an outdoor dance party and at a series of Kibbutzim Oct. 7, horrifying working people worldwide, Israeli forces have moved to decisively defeat Hamas and render it incapable of further murderous assaults.
Israeli soldiers are making significant advances against Hamas strongholds in northern Gaza, while supporters of the Jew-hating group worldwide are stepping up their calls for a cease-fire. This would only give Hamas room to strike again and again.
After surrounding Gaza City, the Israel Defense Forces opened up another “humanitarian” corridor Nov. 7. This allowed thousands more Palestinian civilians to get out of harm’s way and head to the southern part of Gaza, as hundreds of thousands did earlier. Hamas has demanded civilians stay put, and fired on and killed some trying to flee.
The Oct. 7 pogrom is the largest massacre of Jews in a single day since the Holocaust. In addition to killing over 1,400 people, thousands were injured, women were brutalized and raped, and more than 240 taken hostage. Hamas took them to deep underground tunnels in Gaza, many underneath mosques, hospitals and apartment buildings.
The pogrom and the response to it by Israelis and working people worldwide marks a watershed in world politics. Jew-hatred is more and more a part of what imperialism has in store for working people as the crisis of capitalism deepens.
Demonstrations backing Hamas around the world have exposed the growth of Jew-hatred among middle-class layers and the “left.” At the same time, the conflict is drawing millions of workers and youth into politics, posing the question, “Which side are you on?”
Hamas: ‘Everything is justified’
Oct. 7 is just the first time, “there will be a second, a third, a fourth. We are the victims of the occupation. Period,” Ghazi Hamad, a member of the Hamas political bureau, told Lebanese TV channel LBC Oct. 24. “Everything we do is justified.”
When Hamad said Israel must be removed from all “Palestinian lands,” the interviewer asked does this means the complete annihilation of Israel? “Yes, of course,” he replied.
On Oct. 27, Russia Today asked Qatar-based Hamas leader Moussa Abu Marzouk why the group dug over 300 miles of tunnels to hide their combatants and munitions, but not a single bomb shelter for Gaza residents. He took no responsibility for Palestinians there, saying, “Seventy-five percent of the population of Gaza are refugees, and it is the U.N.’s responsibility to protect them.”
Hamas’ strategy has always been to maximize the number of Palestinian civilian casualties so that it can vilify Israel and the Jews and claim “martyrs.” Its goal is to get sympathy and funds from the United Nations and bourgeois regimes worldwide.
Hamas’ central leaders — who are safely ensconced in Qatar and other countries where they live a life of luxury — claim their operation is a huge accomplishment, despite the destruction and thousands of deaths in Gaza.
“We succeeded in putting the Palestinian issue back on the table, and now no one in the region is experiencing calm,” Hamas leader Khalil al-Hayya told the New York Times in a Nov. 8 article.
Despite claims that Hamas conceived and carried out the pogrom on its own, Tehran and Lebanon-based Hezbollah were essential to the planning and carrying out of the assault.
While the reactionary capitalist rulers in Tehran and their Hezbollah allies in Lebanon helped plan, finance and arm Hamas for the Oct. 7 massacre, they have pulled back for now and seem content to make demagogic statements, while avoiding an expanded war that could devastate them.
Most Arabs in Israel oppose Hamas
Some 20% of Israel’s population are Arab citizens. According to Yedioth Aronoth, a poll after Oct. 7 showed that 77% opposed the Hamas assault and just 5% backed it. Some 66% said they support Israel’s right to defend itself, with fewer than 10% opposed.
“The massacre is against everything we believe in, our religion, our Islam, our nationality, our humanity,” United Arab List leader Mansour Abbas, a member of Israel’s parliament, told Arab language Radio Al-Nas Nov. 7.
While the overwhelming majority of the those killed by Hamas were Jews, several dozen Arab citizens of Israel, and Thai, Nepalese and Filipino immigrant workers were also killed and some taken hostage.
Some 20,000 people, including 1,000 Jews, attended the funeral of Awad Darawshe, a 23-year-old Palestinian paramedic from northern Israel, who was murdered by Hamas while treating people at the dance concert that Hamas attacked.
“This is not a religious war. Only the terrorists of Hamas and Hezbollah want to destroy the state of Israel,” Mazen Abu Siam, a Bedouin in Hura, Israel, told France 24.
Actions of the capitalist government often undercut Israel’s own defense. That includes attacks on free speech rights, discrimination against Arab citizens and assaults on Palestinian residents on the West Bank.
Dozens of Arabs have been fired from their jobs or suspended from school since Oct. 7, accused not of carrying out any illegal action, but of expressing sympathy with Hamas or Palestinian rights. Palestinian-Israeli singer Dalal Abu Amneh spent two days in jail and is now under house arrest after posting a Palestinian flag with a Quran verse that said, “There is no victor but Allah.” She was charged with “behavior that could harm public order.”
While the bourgeois-clerical rulers in Tehran and its Hamas and Islamic Jihad proxies would like to establish their authority in the Palestinian West Bank and turn it into another Gaza, most Palestinians there are opposed to inciting a war.
President Joseph Biden says he supports Israel’s right to crush Hamas. But the U.S. rulers’ expanded military in the region is deployed to defend their own economic and political interests, not to fight Jew-hatred.
Other capitalist powers are looking to do the same.
U.S. National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said on Nov. 3 the U.S. is for a “pause.” Others want a more lasting cease-fire.
Cease-fire = support for Hamas
Middle-class radicals and other apologists for Hamas and Tehran are also campaigning for a cease-fire, trying to pose as advocates of “peace.” But for Jews and working people there can be no peace with Hamas.
At a Nov. 4 “peace” march in Washington, marchers chanted “From the river to the sea, Palestine must be free.” This Hamas slogan means — free of Jews.
The veiled and open Jew-hatred that is at the heart of the organizers’ pro-cease-fire and pro-Hamas actions has helped spark a marked increased in physical assaults and threats against Jews on university campuses, against synagogues and elsewhere.
Stop AntiSemitism, a group that publicizes acts of Jew-hatred, says that since Oct. 7 it is getting 500 reports daily, a big increase.
Jewish student groups and other opponents of Jew-hatred are responding. They have organized rallies on campuses and elsewhere against Jew-hatred and in defense of Israel’s right to exist.
This fight is a key question for the working class and the unions as the crisis of capitalism deepens.
A Nov. 14 national rally in Washington, D.C., under the theme “Americans March for Israel, March to Free Hostages, March Against Antisemitism” will be an important opportunity for working people and others to take action.