With their move into Rafah, Israeli forces are making progress in the fight to dismantle Hamas in Gaza, an absolute necessity to prevent the Tehran-backed group from carrying out its threats to keep massacring Jews “again and again.”
Since May 6, nearly a million Palestinians have heeded Israel’s call to evacuate Rafah, near the Egypt-Gaza border. This has allowed Israeli troops to go after Hamas death squads and destroy its tunnels and weapon stores, while minimizing civilian casualties. Israeli forces have found more than 50 cross-border tunnels between Rafah and Egypt that likely were used to supply Hamas and move combatants back and forth.
Hamas refuses to free the 124 remaining hostages it seized and has held captive since Oct. 7, when it carried out the worst anti-Jewish pogrom since World War II. Hamas and Islamic Jihad death squads murdered 1,200 people, mostly civilians, wounded more than 5,000 and raped and mutilated dozens of women.
Even with Israel in control of most of Rafah, the Israel Defense Forces are being cautious, according to the Jerusalem Post, “to avoid even the possibility that a misfire might hit nearby Egyptian troops,” part of an “understanding” with Egyptian officials. The Egyptian government publicly says it opposes the Israeli offensive against Hamas and closed the Rafah border crossing in protest — blocking humanitarian aid — after Israel took control. For their own reasons, many Arab governments in the region, including Cairo, would like to see Hamas destroyed.
Despite these facts, and amid ongoing negotiations between Washington and the Saudi monarchy over a proposed peace deal, International Criminal Court prosecutor Karim Khan announced May 20 that he is seeking arrest warrants for Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant and three Hamas leaders, Yahya Sinwar, Mohammed Deif and Ismail Haniyeh, for “war crimes,” as if there was moral equivalency between Israel’s defense of its right to exist and the Hamas pogromists!
Deliberate lie of Israeli genocide
Khan slanders the Israeli government, claiming it’s seeking the “extermination” of Palestinians, including “deaths caused by starvation.” This same charge has been made almost daily by Hamas apologists, and others that echo them, like the editors of the New York Times.
But the goal of the capitalist Israeli rulers isn’t to eliminate the Palestinians, but to prevent future slaughters of Jews. In fact, in Rafah and other areas Israeli forces have entered, they have given Gazan civilians warning and time to move out of combat zones before attacking, even though this also allows Hamas thugs to escape for now.
Claiming that Israel is carrying out “genocide” is a complete falsification. Genocide is the deliberate, systematic attempt to bring about the extermination of an entire people.
The most obvious case of genocide in the imperialist epoch is the Nazi’s systematic slaughter of 6 million Jews, 40% of the world’s Jewish population, in the Holocaust during World War II. There are still fewer Jews in the world today than at the start of that war.
Major imperialist powers from Washington to London closed their doors to Jews seeking to flee the Holocaust, including after the war ended. That, and Stalinist betrayals of promising revolutionary situations in France, Italy, Greece and elsewhere, is why the creation of Israel as a refuge for Jews became inevitable.
The death of civilians in Gaza — some 16,000 out of a population of more than 2 million — along with the death of some 14,000 Hamas combatants, is not genocide. And it’s Hamas, not Israel, that is responsible. Hamas uses Palestinians as human shields, stationing its forces underneath and inside hospitals, schools, mosques, U.N. buildings and residential neighborhoods.
Despite the International Criminal Court prosecutor’s claim that Israel is causing “starvation” in Gaza, the Israeli government has provided thousands of tents to Palestinians fleeing combat zones and worked with humanitarian organizations to make possible field kitchens and field hospitals, increased the flow of water to Gaza and expanded the number of crossings for aid.
Genocidal plans of Hamas, Tehran
It’s Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah and the government in Tehran that seek another genocidal “Final Solution.”
Hamas’ founding covenant calls for the killing of all Jews. Hamas leaders say they want to carry out more pogroms like Oct. 7 until they destroy Israel and kill or expel all the Jews.
Hamas apologist Nerdeen Kiswani, the main spokesperson for the New York-based Within Our Lifetime group, which has organized protests calling for a cease-fire in Gaza, lauds Oct. 7 as a “heroic” act of “resistance.” Despite eyewitness reports of the murders of civilians; rapes perpetrated by the Hamas death squads; photographic proof of mutilation of the bodies of those they raped and killed, Kiswani cynically claims it’s all lies.
For months, the U.S. rulers have been ratcheting up pressure on Israel to abandon efforts to defeat Hamas, a course that would be disastrous for working people in the region, leaving the Tehran-backed group intact to target Jews and threaten Israel’s existence. While Secretary of State Antony Blinken condemned the international court prosecutor’s call for arrest warrants as “shameful,” his main concern was that it “does nothing to help, and could jeopardize, ongoing efforts to reach a cease-fire agreement.”
The U.S. rulers put their own predatory interests in the Middle East above all else, not defense of Israel or of Jews.
The campaign against Israel by Hamas apologists has fueled an increase in anti-Jewish violence around the world. In New York City’s Upper East Side, glass doors at three Jewish-owned stores were smashed in the early morning of May 15, right after Israel celebrated its independence day.
On May 12 a man fled after assaulting two Jewish children in Brooklyn, hitting one in the head and knocking the other to the ground and kicking him.