REVOLUTION 6

Taking on the "justifications" for Israel's genocide of Palestinians

[Audio transcript]

BOB AVAKIAN—REVOLUTION

Number Six

This is Bob Avakian (BA), coming back with more straight talk: bringing out the truth about what is happening in Palestine, and answering the arguments— the lies and distortions— that try to “justify” the genocidal slaughter of Palestinians being perpetrated by Israel, fully backed by the U.S.

Over and over, you hear media mouthpieces of this system (and others) justifying the genocidal actions of Israel by pointing to the attack on Israel by the Palestinian armed force Hamas on October 7 last year (2023), when Hamas killed large numbers of Israeli civilians, including children, and committed other atrocities, while taking hundreds of Israelis hostage.

But the crucial events did not begin on October 7, 2023. In establishing the state of Israel, in1948, Israeli forces systematically destroyed hundreds of Palestinian villages, murdering thousands, raping women in large numbers, driving hundreds of thousands from their homes. And since then, Israel has repeatedly carried out murderous oppression of the Palestinian people, with repeated massacres involving the most depraved acts. So, even though Hamas is not a force for liberation, and its actions on October 7 did involve war crimes, this is nowhere on the same scale as what Israel has done to the Palestinian people for generations, before October 7—and it is nowhere close to the genocidal slaughter of Palestinians that Israel is carrying out now.

As I have pointed out before—speaking to the horrors to which Jews were subjected at the hands of Hitler and the Nazis, and how the situation now is very different:

This is not the 1930s and World War 2, with the Nazis inflicting horrific atrocities and mass genocide on the Jewish people. The situation is not one where Palestinians are herding helpless Jews into concentration camps and subjecting them to genocide. The actual situation is the opposite of that.

Israel is a nuclear-armed military power, heavily supplied and supported by the dominant imperialist power in the world, the U.S.; and in its relation with the Palestinian people, Israel is the dominant nation that has, for generations, imposed apartheid oppression on the Palestinians.

(That is from my statement Some Basic Truth About Israel And Palestine, which you can find at revcom.us.)

Here’s another excuse raised by Israel and its supporters to “justify” its mass slaughter of Palestinians: “Hamas is hiding among the Palestinian population in Gaza, so Israel can’t help killing civilians in going after Hamas.”

This is more bullshit. The fact is that Israel is attacking Gaza with massive (2000 pound) bombs that are bound to kill huge numbers of civilians, not just Hamas fighters. More than 2 million Palestinians are packed into the tiny territory of Gaza, confined there under Israeli control, so is it really surprising that Hamas is “mixed in” among the larger Palestinian population? It is disgusting hypocrisy for Israel to complain that Hamas is mixed in among the overall population in Gaza and to use that as an excuse for slaughtering Palestinian civilians.

“Well, what is Israel supposed to do, just let this attack by Hamas go unanswered, encouraging further attacks? What about Israel’s right to defend itself?” That is another argument raised by Israel and its supporters.

The truth is that Israel, like apartheid South Africa before it, is an illegitimate state—and as such, it has no legitimate right to “defend itself”—and its so-called “defense” has repeatedly involved the deliberate killing of civilians, including large numbers of children.

What is Israel supposed to do? Israel is “supposed” to stop brutally oppressing the Palestinian people. But Israel, as a racist, Jewish-supremacist (Zionist) state, cannot do that: it cannot do that, because murderous oppression of the Palestinian people has been built into the state of Israel from the very beginning, and Israel could not exist without brutally oppressing the Palestinian people.

And, since Israel cannot stop brutally oppressing the Palestinian people, Israel—as a racist, Zionist state—must cease to exist.

The real question is: what is the legitimate way to fight against the state of Israel, and what is a just solution to all this?

The answer is definitely not to “kill off all the Jews in Israel” or “drive them into the sea.” The answer is the abolition of the state of Israel, and in its place the creation of a revolutionary state in which the government and the laws do not promote any religion and do not favor one people over another, and instead there is equality between Jews and Palestinians.

The answer is also definitely not the “two-state solution” being promoted by the Biden administration. Such a “two-state solution” would really amount to nothing more than a powerful state of Israel continuing to occupy land stolen from the Palestinian people, while the so-called “Palestinian state” created with this “solution” would be a bitter joke—a puppetstate—merely a patchwork of separated small territories, surrounded and dominated by Israel, with the Palestinian people still subjected to terrible oppression and deprivation.

The answer is that the fight against the state of Israel must be waged on a revolutionary basis, with the goal of putting an end to all oppressive relations and all inequality among people based on race and nationality, sex and gender, and all relations in which one part of society exploits others. And the urgent need is for a revolutionary force to emerge to lead the struggle on that basis.

Next, I’ll be getting into more about the Israeli genocide against the Palestinian people, and especially the role of the U.S.in all this —and how this sharply highlights the need for a revolution to overthrow and thoroughly abolish this system.

Then, I’m going to get directly into how we could actually make this revolution—right in this most powerful imperialist country, the USA—right in this time.