As Israeli forces continue to deal significant blows to Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, tens of thousands gathered around the world to commemorate those murdered or taken hostage during the Tehran-backed Oct. 7, 2023, pogrom in Israel. They are determined to defend Israel’s existence as a refuge for Jews and to speak out against Jew-hatred.
Survivors of the Oct. 7 pogrom — which left 1,200 dead, thousands wounded and some 250 people seized and held hostage in Gaza — are increasingly speaking out about the sadistic actions carried out by Hamas thugs that day. It was the largest massacre of Jews since the Nazi-organized Holocaust during World War II.
Hamas assassins filmed their carnage to maximize the impact of their attacks, which were aimed at terrorizing and dehumanizing Jews and anyone who dares to work with Jews.
Not only did they post videos on Hamas internet sites, they used their victims’ phones to broadcast their brutality live for relatives and friends to see, including the murder of 74-year-old Bracha Levinson, the daughter of Holocaust survivors. Levinson’s family learned of her death when they opened Facebook and saw a video posted by Hamas of their grandmother lying in a pool of blood.
At least 364 of the murders on Oct. 7 took place at the Nova music festival. “We saw murder, kidnappings, but the hardest of them all was rape,” pogrom survivor Yuval Sharvit Trabelsi told a commemoration in Tel Aviv. “I have never heard screams for help like the ones I heard” from one of the women being raped, she said. Trabelsi survived the massacre by smearing her husband’s blood on herself and playing dead.
The Israeli government has been making public previously unreleased footage of Oct. 7. New movies such as “We Will Dance Again,” released by Paramount, include both testimonies of survivors of the pogrom and videos taken by the Hamas thugs themselves.
Tehran: Oct. 7 is legitimate
Tehran and its so-called axis of resistance — including Hamas, Hezbollah, militias in Iraq and Syria and the Houthis — claim Oct. 7 was a “prison break” of the people of Gaza and that anything and everything Hamas did is “legitimate.” In fact it is Hamas, backed by Tehran, that has its boot on the neck of the people of Gaza, threatening anyone who stands up to them. They are the biggest obstacle that working people there face to being able to organize and work with other workers to advance their own interests.
Most of Hamas’ combat brigades have been dismantled, along with many of its tunnels. The best it could muster to honor what it still calls its “victory” Oct. 7, was five rockets fired from one of its last remaining strongholds in Gaza. Two women in the center of Israel were injured.
Thousands of Israeli troops are advancing in southern Lebanon, pummeling Hezbollah, with the goal of pushing the Jew-hating group back to at least 8 to 10 miles from the Israeli border, to allow more than 60,000 people evacuated from northern Israel to return home.
On top of blows dealt to Hamas, the leadership of Hezbollah has been decimated by the Israeli offensive over the last several weeks. This has advanced the fight to defend Israel’s right to exist as a refuge for Jews and the fight against Jew-hatred worldwide. Hezbollah was founded in 1982, trained, financed and armed by the reactionary capitalist regime in Tehran.
But a decisive victory against Hezbollah will take time. It has over 100,000 missiles in its arsenal and its members have combat experience, defending the Bashar al-Assad dictatorship in Syria as it fought to crush the 2011 popular uprising there.
Israeli advances in Gaza and Lebanon have come at a cost. On top of the 380 Israel Defense Forces soldiers killed Oct. 7, more than 346 have died since the start of the ground operations against Hamas Oct. 27. More than 4,500 have been wounded.
Threat to Jews from Tehran
The challenge facing Israelis is the bourgeois clerical regime in Iran, which is committed to the destruction of Israel and the expulsion or death of Jews there.
Most of the some 180 ballistic missiles Tehran fired at Israel Oct. 1, 2024, were intercepted and caused relatively little damage — this time. But even if Israel is able to shoot down 90% of future missiles they might not be so lucky next time.
And Tehran is driving to acquire nuclear weapons.
An editorial in the pro-regime Kayan newspaper in Iran threatened that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps air force commander “still has his finger on the trigger” and its aim is to destroy “the Zionist regime.”
U.S. officials estimate that it could take Tehran less than two weeks to convert its current nuclear-fuel stockpile into enough weapons-grade material for four nuclear weapons.
Workers in Iran oppose regime
The regime’s military adventures and its attempts to extend its counterrevolutionary influence by arming proxy forces across the Middle East are not popular among Iranian working people. The biggest obstacle to Tehran’s expansionist foreign policy and its deadly assaults on Israel are working people in Iran — Persian, Kurdish, Azerbaijani, Baluch, Arab and others — who are standing up to the regime’s anti-working-class actions.
The Progressive Student Association at Isfahan University noted Oct. 8 that “the shadow of war has been cast over Iranian society.
“The main war is the war between the people and the government, and protest and strikes are the strongest weapons of the people in this battle, which should never be put down,” their statement said. Protest actions by retirees, oil workers and others for better wages, pensions and working conditions are not slowing down.
The U.S. government continues to advance the U.S. rulers’ class interests by pressing the government of Israel to agree to back off its decisive fight to defang Tehran, Hamas, et al. U.S. imperialism does not start from defending Jews from pogroms or Israel’s right to exist as an all-too-necessary refuge to Jews.
It’s only concern is the stability the U.S. capitalist class requires for its own profit-driven interests, including the Biden administration’s efforts to reach an accommodation with the regime in Tehran.
After Oct. 7 the White House warned Israel not to go into Rafah on the Gaza-Egypt border. It complained when an Israeli bombing raid killed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. And now the Joseph Biden administration is telling Israel not to try to destroy Iran’s nuclear development facilities. But Israel’s capitalist government is not willing to put Israel’s existence and the lives of millions of Jews on the line by caving in to the U.S. rulers’ demands.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the U.N. General Assembly Sept. 27 that Israel will do everything it must to prevent Tehran from getting nuclear weapons.
The Times of Israel noted Oct. 7, 2024, that on Sept. 30, Biden had begun the day by calling for a “ceasefire now” between Israel and Hezbollah. “Hours later, the IDF announced that it had begun a series of raids aimed at dismantling Hezbollah posts on the Lebanese side of the border.”