Israel’s efforts to dismantle Hamas’ capacity to wage wars on Jews resumed in Gaza Dec. 1, after the reactionary group reneged on its agreement to release all the women and children it seized during the Oct. 7 pogrom in Israel. Some 17 to 20 women and children are still among the 138 hostages remaining in captivity.
In exchange for the earlier releases, the Israeli government had paused its offensive against Hamas for a week, freed 240 imprisoned Palestinian women and children convicted or charged with acts of violence, and facilitated more than 2,700 truckloads of food, medicine and other basic necessities into Gaza, which has been under Hamas’ dictatorial rule since 2006.
Some 1,200 people were slaughtered in southern Israel Oct. 7 by Tehran-backed and financed Hamas death squads, 5,400 wounded and 240 taken hostage. This includes dozens of Arab citizens and permanent residents of Israel and migrant farmworkers from Thailand, Nepal and other countries.
Israel’s Walla news site Dec. 4 gave the first overall breakdown on those killed Oct. 7. Fourteen children under age 10 — including two infants — 36 children between 10 and 19, and 25 people over the age of 80 were killed in the assault. The majority were civilians.
Hamas’ pogrom, the largest single-day massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, and the Israeli response — like Ukraine’s resistance to Moscow’s invasion — mark a major turning point in world politics. For capitalist rulers around the world it has spurred shifts in alliances as they compete for markets, political influence and military dominance against their rivals.
Millions of working people, appalled at the massacre of Jews and people who work alongside Jews, are being drawn into politics, looking for a road to end these atrocities.
The pogrom unleashed a rise in acts of Jew-hatred under the banner of opposing “Zionism.” These are harbingers of the Jew-hating violence that will increasingly raise its head as the world capitalist crisis deepens.
Washington provides arms and claims to stand with Israel. But like other capitalist regimes it defends its own interests. This has nothing to do with fighting Jew-hatred, defending Israel’s right to exist as a refuge for Jews or protecting Palestinian civilians.
Washington no friend of Jews
That’s what’s behind the sharp exchanges between Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Israeli officials. In his meeting with Israel’s cabinet Nov. 30, Blinken pressed the Israeli government to “avoid” damage to hospitals and power stations. But Hamas keeps its weapons, tunnels and command posts underneath hospitals, schools, mosques and apartment buildings, using people there as human shields.
Blinken demands Israel must somehow avoid “further significant displacement of civilians inside of Gaza” and establish “safe zones” that Palestinians can go to away from the buildings the IDF targets.
The Israeli government made clear it won’t stop fighting to dismantle Hamas, “even if it takes months,” Defense Minister Yoav Gallant told Blinken.
The simple fact is this is what will prevent further rounds of Hamas attacks on Jews. Blinken replied, “I don’t think you have the credit” with the U.S. government for that.
Hamas: ‘No regrets’ for massacre
Osama Hamden, a member of the Hamas Political Bureau, was asked on a Lebanese talk show Dec. 1 if he has “regrets” about Oct. 7.
“Regret for shattering an entire division of the occupation army?” was his reply. “I can promise a war of liberation is coming, not just another Oct. 7.” His claim that the 1,200 men, women, children and senior citizens Hamas murdered were an army division is blatantly false. It underscores their target is all Jews.
Within days of Blinken’s visit, the Israel Defense Forces launched a new offensive, surrounding Hamas’ command posts in northern, central and southern Gaza, and dealing more blows to its command structure.
Israeli military officials said Dec. 4 that some 15,000 Gazan residents have died since Oct. 7 in Israeli assaults, roughly 5,000 of them combatants of Hamas and its allies.
Meanwhile, the Israeli government and private organizations are releasing more details on the brutality Hamas and its allies carried out Oct. 7.
Women brutalized
Army reservist Shari Mendes told the Jerusalem Post that her army unit came across bodies of “female soldiers who were shot in the crotch — intimate parts/vagina — or shot in the breast. This seemed to be a systematic genital mutilation of a group of victims.”
Many women’s bodies had their faces severely disfigured. “It was often impossible for families to be shown faces — and it seems as if the mutilation of these women’s faces was an objective. … In some cases this was done after death.”
The Israeli government has guarded the privacy of hostages who have been released. But more information is coming out on their treatment in captivity.
The hostages were deprived of adequate food, water and medicine. One doctor who has treated those freed said that at least 10 men and women were sexually abused in captivity.
One of the freed Thai workers told Israeli officials that they ate “one pita a day” and occasionally were given a can of tuna to share among four. “The Jews who were with me were treated more harshly,” he said. “Sometimes they were beaten with electrical cables.”
Apologists for Hamas try to bamboozle student radicals and others worldwide who know little about Israel and Hamas by presenting themselves as opponents of imperialist war, progressive advocates of equal rights and for peace.
The pro-cease-fire actions they advocate are themselves a cover for Jew-hatred. During a Philly Palestine Coalition march in Philadelphia Dec. 3, the group stopped outside falafel shop Goldie, one of many Jewish-owned restaurants targeted by the Hamas apologists. They chanted “Goldie, Goldie, you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide.”
There is only one reason his shop was targeted: because its owner, Michael Solomonov, is a Jew born in Israel. In fact, he has been a critic of many policies of the Israeli government. The coalition calls for a boycott of restaurants owned by Israeli and non-Israeli Jews.
In Paris a contingent of 200 women tried to join a Nov. 25 march condemning violence against women, to highlight Hamas’ rape and slaughter of Jewish women. Pointing to the refusal of some women’s rights campaigners to condemn Hamas, they carried placards reading, “Metoo unless you are a Jew.” Some participants barred them from joining the action.
Jew-hatred and free speech
Some defenders of Israel’s right to exist as a refuge for Jews have called for barring meetings or school recognition of groups who offer support to Hamas, rather than politically confronting them and mobilizing the broad support that exists, especially in the working class, against Jew-hatred.
In an assault on free speech, Columbia University banned Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace Nov. 10, saying they held “an unauthorized event” and used “threatening rhetoric and intimidation.”
There is also a debate opening in the labor movement. While large numbers of working people in the U.S. oppose Hamas and would like to see it destroyed, three national union leadership bodies — the American Postal Workers Union, the United Auto Workers and the United Electrical Workers union — have backed the call for a permanent cease-fire. UAW President Shawn Fain said the union calls for a cease-fire because it “has consistently stood for justice across the globe,” including “mobilizing against apartheid South Africa and the [U.S.] CONTRA war,” in Nicaragua.
But in calling for a cease-fire Fain says nothing about Hamas’ long anti-working-class record that includes breaking strikes in Gaza and arresting union fighters. Leaving Hamas intact, ready to carry out future pogroms against Jews and attacks on working people, has nothing to do with “justice,” nor is it in the interest of working people anywhere.