“Either revolution will prevent war, or war will lead to revolution”
– Mao Zedong
On 7th October, 2023, thousands of rockets were launched from the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip against Israel. Hamas crossed the barrier and attacked Israel’s military bases near the Gaza Strip. After this Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu called Gaza “the city of evil,” and made it clear that “we will turn all the places where Hamas is organised and hiding into cities of ruins. I say to the residents of Gaza – get out of there now.
We will act everywhere and with all our strength.” The current situation should not be characterised as a war between Israel and Hamas or between Israel and Gaza. It is a war of national liberation of the Palestinian people against the fascist and Zionist colonial rule of Israel. Long after the end of direct colonialism, Palestine is one of the nations denied their right to establish an independent sovereign state. During the First World War, the United Kingdom supported Palestinian revolt against the Ottoman Empire and agreed to recognize their independence after the war. They also issued the Balfour Declaration announcing support for the establishment of a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine. During the same period, Britain and France planned to split and occupy parts of the territory making the secret Sykes–Picot Agreement in 1916. Following the First World War and the occupation of the region by the British, the Allied powers drafted a mandate, approved by the League of Nations in 1922 that gave the administrative power to Britain to establish a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine. Britain administered Palestine between 1920 and 1948. Against the wishes of the Palestinians, the British facilitated Jewish settlement through mass immigration. The immigration caused a major demographic shift and alarmed the Palestinians. Between 1922 and 1947, the Jewish population in Palestine had risen from ~10% to ~32%. On 2nd April, 1947, the United Kingdom requested that the question of Palestine be handled by the United Nations General Assembly which recommended a Jewish state be set up. On 29th November, 1947, a resolution was passed to partition Palestine into two states, one Arab and one Jewish, with Jerusalem placed under a special international regime.
The British withdrawal from Palestine was finally completed in May, 1948 and the State of Israel was formed. This caused a war between Israel and Arab Nations which resulted in the shattering of Palestinian society and the dispersal of more than half of their number as refugees in neighbouring Arab states.
They were seeing Arabs as “the rocks of Judea, as obstacles that had to be cleared on a difficult path”. The class nature of this satire revealed itself when the new Israeli state became the watchdog of the US imperialist bloc engineering continual unrest in the oil-rich Middle East.
The current retaliation is a result of Israeli occupation. The human rights of the Palestinians are denied. Their cultural practices and religious beliefs are attacked. Amnesty International’s report of 2022 says, “We found that Israel’s cruel policies of segregation, dispossession, and exclusion across all territories under its control clearly amount to apartheid. The international community has an obligation to act.” During the war, there were several cases of violation of International law on war like attacks on hospitals, mosques, churches, the use of chemical bombs, the closing of the boundaries of Gaza, and denial of drinking water, food, fuel, and even healthcare essentials.
The war waged by the Palestinian people is a just war since it is aimed at national liberation. The support for a particular war should be contingent on the politics of the war rather than the politics of the parties present as has led to denouncement of the offensive by Hamas. On the one hand, there is Israel, a racist, apartheid colonial state supported by the US bloc, on the other hand, forces struggling to establish a liberated Palestine where all citizens can live without discrimination or oppression regardless of their religion. India abstaining from voting for a ceasefire at the United Nations General assembly makes a clear statement of allegiance towards Israel. While Israel depends upon sophisticated technology like the ‘iron dome’, capable of tackling any missile attack, smart fences, watchtowers and sensors to detect any underground activity, surveillance of all telephone communications and electronic signals etc., the Palestinians have their iron will. Vietnam and many other liberation wars have shown that victory is not decided by technology but by the determination of the people to fight till victory.
