It’s been three years since Oct. 7, 2023, when Gaza-based Hamas thugs — trained, financed and armed by Tehran — swarmed into Israel and carried out the worst slaughter of Jews since the Nazis killed 6 million Jews during the Holocaust in World War II.
On Oct. 7, some 1,200 people, mostly Jewish civilians, were murdered — including 378 at the Nova music festival, as well as entire families in their homes near the Gaza border — thousands wounded and more than 250 taken hostage. The thugs raped and mutilated dozens of women.
Thousands of Jews and others from Israel to Los Angeles, New York and Washington, D.C., joined commemorations Oct. 7, making it clear that they will continue to stand up to the Jew-haters. This year’s events took on added importance in the face of spreading vitriol and violence against Jews, and its “normalization” by governments and bourgeois media worldwide.
Middle-class groups that support Hamas took to the streets the same day to celebrate the massacre, claiming the pogrom was a “glorious” action that advanced the liberation of the Palestinian people.
“Know your truth. Be strong. Be loud. Don’t give up,” Andrei Kozlov told some 400 people at the Oct. 7 commemoration at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in Lower Manhattan. Kozlov, who is not Jewish, was a security guard at the Nova festival, where he was taken hostage by Hamas and held captive for 246 days until an Israeli army raid freed him.
Speaking to some 2,000 people at the Oct. 7 commemoration in Beverly Hills, in Los Angeles County, Modi Ephraim, consul general of Israel to the Pacific Southwest, said, “Anti-Zionism is fueling the highest number of antisemitic attacks since the Holocaust.” He pointed to the organized murder of Jews in Boulder, Colorado; Manchester, England; Bondi Beach, Australia; Montreal; and Washington, D.C.
Hamas spent years planning the pogrom, including simulating attacks using models of the kibbutzim its thugs planned to destroy. Hamas methodically organized to lull Israeli officials into believing that despite its calls for slaughter of Jews, it had become more “pragmatic” and could be worked with. This was all a lie.
Hamas also murdered more than 50 immigrant farmworkers as well 24 Arab citizens of Israeli — often after brutal torture. In the eyes of Hamas, working with Jews as equals is a crime punishable by death.
Hamas knew that many of those targeted, like at Kibbutz Be’eri, were activists in peace groups that back calls for a separate Palestinian state, viewing the government of Israel as an obstacle to “peace.” It didn’t matter. To Hamas all Jews are the enemy.
Hamas wants civilian ‘martyrs’
Hamas knew that once it launched the pogrom Israel would fight back. That’s why Hamas built its weapons caches and command posts underneath hospitals, schools, residential housing, mosques and U.N. offices, using Palestinian civilians as human shields. It wanted to maximize the number of civilian deaths it could claim as martyrs to their movement.
Despite all these facts, Israel’s defensive war to ensure that Hamas can no longer launch new pogroms to murder Jews is constantly slandered as “genocide.”
The most open and virulent Jew-hatred — often cloaked with the label of “anti-Zionism” — comes from middle-class radicals and pro-Hamas groups. But more “mainstream” forces, from the Nobel Peace Prize committee to New York Times columnists, feel free to bandy about the blood libel that Israel is committing “genocide” in Gaza. They are increasingly joined by politicians from both the left and the right of bourgeois politics.
These capitalist news outlets cover up the fact that since its formation, Hamas has openly declared its goal is to kill or expel all the Jews in Palestine and destroy Israel, the only refuge for Jews in the world. Hamas’ 1988 covenant quotes the czarist-epoch forgery “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” promoting the lie that Jews control the world.
Hamas, al-Husseini and Hitler
In fact, Hamas traces its continuity to the Egypt-based Muslim Brotherhood and Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who collaborated with the Nazis during World War II. From a wealthy landlord family, al-Husseini’s political life back to the 1920s was marked by Jew-hating pogroms, when few believed a Jewish state was even possible.
Before the rise of fascist Germany and Adolf Hitler’s Nazi party, most Jews in Europe had no intention of moving to Palestine. The Holocaust changed everything.
The Moscow-dominated Communist Party in Germany, despite having the support of millions of workers there, refused to join with the Socialist Party to fight fascism. Instead, they stood aside as Jew-hatred flourished, saying, “After Hitler, our turn.”
As the Nazis moved to impose their “Final Solution,” Jews attempting to flee were turned away by all the major imperialist powers, including Washington, London and Ottawa.
By the time the war ended, two out of three Jews in Europe — some 40% of Jews worldwide — had been murdered by the Nazis. The U.S., British and other imperialist victors still refused to accept Jews who survived Hitler’s death camps. The British used military force to try and prevent Jews from escaping to what was to become Israel.
Where were the Jews to go? Shut out elsewhere, they found ways to get to Palestine. Jewish leaders accepted the United Nations partition plan for two states, one Palestinian, and one Jewish.
Arab misleaders attack Israel in 1948
But the reactionary semifeudal landlord misleaders of Arabs in the region joined with al-Husseini. They attacked the new Israeli state, hoping to demolish it before it could be established. They failed at a tremendous cost in human lives to both sides in the war.
Israel exists today as the only refuge from Jew-hatred for Jews in the world. And one small proof that Israel and the Jews oppose genocide against Arabs, Muslims or Palestinians is that today some 20% of the citizens of Israel are Arabs.
Just two days after Oct. 7 this year, former U.N. human rights chief Navi Pillay, who presided over a commission that declared Israel was committing genocide in Gaza, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
Last year Pillay spoke out in defense of a member of her commission who said that social media is “controlled largely by the Jewish lobby.”
Israel will not — and should not — back off defending itself as a refuge for Jews. One atom bomb dropped on Israel — a country roughly the size of New Jersey — could kill half the Jews in the world.
Since Oct. 7, 2023, Israeli forces have struck big blows to Tehran, Hamas’ primary enabler; to Hamas; Hezbollah in Lebanon; the Houthis in Yemen; and other members of Tehran’s “axis of resistance.” These advances are in the interests of working people everywhere.